Starling
by ArentYouSophiaLoren-8887
Summary: After Campbell Saunders died, he left an unbearable weight of grief and guilt in his wake. As time moves on without him, the people broken by his death continue to live with their choices, both the ones they've made and the ones that could change their lives even more.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note: Aaaand we have come to the reign of Cam suicide fics in Degrassi fanfiction! Ahhh, the horrors. The fanfiction cliché horrors. But alas, gentle reader, I have done what Degrassi oft aspires to do – "go there" – and have gone there. Okay, well, "there" happens to be the desk chair in my bedroom that isn't very comfortable, but it's where I get most of my work done, and I hope you can trust me to not fuck it up. Because I don't want to fuck it up any more than you want to read a bad fic – believe me. **

**For those of you who bear with me through this, you are awesome. I have been writing in Degrassi fandom for over two years now, and while I do love to write and would probably do it for myself (let's all just ignore what that has to say about the state of my social life), the fun is writing for you guys. Any support is a great bonus. I'm proud of a lot of the recent work I've done, and hopefully this fic will continue that streak. **

**I PROMISE, you won't have to wait three months for an update every time…you know, like a certain fic I wrote about a certain pairing that went to a certain city of sin a few months ago... **

**Last (but CERTAINLY not least), the beautiful banner for this fic was made by the astronomically awesome sogoodatmending, who followed through on a strange and specific request. Please, praise her name on high.**

**I don't own Degrassi.**

"**You alone will have stars as no one else has them... In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the sky at night..You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me... You will always be my friend." **

– **The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery.**

"**When you see me fly away without you/ shadow all the things you know/ Feathers fall around you/ And show you the way to go/ Cause it's over" **

– "**Birds", Neil Young**

"**Oh, little prince! Bit by bit I come to understand the secrets of your sad little life…" **

– **The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery**

**I.**

For Maya, the best nights are the ones that no longer involve sleep. Sleep is a demon – it takes over her body, throws it into a dark chaos she can't escape from, and holds on no matter how hard she fights to claw herself free. Sleep is full dark, no stars, an endless screaming vortex hurling her through black nothing. Sleep drowns her, and at the same time refuses to let her sink.

No. The best nights, now, are the ones when the night is clear. When the moon hangs in the sky, reassuring in its full roundness, no parts of itself lost in the dark. When the pines stretch as far as they can towards the sky, trying to scratch the surface. When the creaking wind pushes against them, and they shake and swagger, boasting, _look how high! _

Nights like these are best for slipping out of her bedroom window. Tiptoeing down the block to meet the moon. No matter how far she goes, the moon always hovers in the same place, just beyond her grasp. It stares at her with patient silver eyes, watching her efforts to catch it.

The no-man's land of these early morning hours belong to her lately. They're supposed to be the start of a new day, but instead they just freeze the whole world until dawn. It seems funny to her, that the world keeps on moving when everyone doesn't watch. No one but her, and her moon.

By now, she's settled into a schedule. Lay in a half-conscious daze until 3 AM. Watch DVDs on laptop until 5. Pass out until her alarm goes off at 7:30. Ignore it. Wake up when Katie bangs on the door forty minutes later, saying they'll be late. Ignore her. Stay under the covers all day. Repeat cycle.

Mom and Dad haven't made her to go school, but tomorrow – or, really, today – they will. Tori texted her after dinner and said she'd be waiting right out front, so she and Tris could be there for her. Maya wonders what, exactly, that means – "be there for her". But never asked. She's been ignoring Tori for the past few days, refusing her many offers to come over and just spend time with her. What is she supposed to say to "if you ever need to talk, just know you can tell me anything. Or don't, if you're not ready. Whatever you need, I'm going to be there for you."

That phrase again; "be there for you". It's the same thing Tori said when she hugged her at the funeral last week, the same thing she hears her parents whispering to each other in the kitchen when they think Maya's sleeping. It's what Simpson said at the assembly they had the day before she quit going to school – bringing in grief counselors to Degrassi, letting anyone who wants to talk, talk. Simpson pulled her aside afterward and quietly suggested going, but Maya shuddered at the thought.

The stars are out tonight, numerous as wishes. She likes looking up at them, makes her wish she knew the constellations. Sirius. Orion. The smear of the Milky Way across the endlessness of space. Sheets and sheets of stars to wrap herself in. She learned in Grade 7 science that stars burned so brightly that we still see their glowing, blinding, unforgettable residue, years and years and years after they should have been forgotten.

The wind is blowing. Night air is scentless, she's noticed, compared to how sweet it smells during the day. Now that everything is coming back into bloom, bursting, growing, springing, living.

She turns away from a sky filled with the dead and the dying. Climbs back through the open window, like a mouth retracting a slip of the tongue. She's still cold, but that can be solved soon. Cold, it seems, is a permanent state of being for her lately, so while everyone else is shedding their winter layers and comparing puny tan lines, she finds that she needs to button up. Without at least a jacket, she feels completely exposed, all eyes on her. Wraps herself in three towels when she gets out of the shower. At night, she piles her bed with blankets, and wraps herself up so well that only her mouth peeks out beneath the folds, so she can breathe. Barely.

She tugs an old blue comforter of Katie's that's been in the closet for years over her head, wrapping herself in it like a burka, hiding herself from the silver knowing eyes of the moon that see everything. Still watching. Still knowing. Still there.

**II.**

The third night that the bird doesn't wake him up, Dallas is listening to the clock tick through the walls from the room next door. He can hear it like he can hear a pulse underwater, thrumming behind his eyes and in the palms of his hands. Its precision calms him; the steadiness of it, the non-negotiable _tick-tick-tick_ of the minutes. No matter what he's doing, the minutes will always tick by. Another day, another night, another day again. Sunrise and sunset, night chased away by the day, then surrendered to the darkness again.

And all those songs say that time isn't guaranteed. Well, they lied. If there's one thing he's learned, it's that time is about the _only _thing guaranteed.

The bird that hasn't woken him up for the past few nights is still sitting on the branch outside his window. It hasn't woken him up because you have to be asleep in order to wake; these days, he's learned to live under a crow's-wing sky, and how to trade in a few hours of counterfeit sleep for the language of 3 AM. Dallas doesn't know what kind of bird it is, but he's pretty sure it's the same bird he's been hearing every night for almost a week now – there must be a nest in the live oak outside his bedroom. He keeps the window closed and the blinds pulled, but it doesn't do anything to stop the bird. It's nightsong has become as steady as the tick of time, for now.

He's found that avoiding sleep is getting easier; what better way to duck the fragments of dreams he'd rather not suffer. Closing his eyes is a workout; too much effort to keep them shut. Better to just leave them open, and save himself the trouble. These days, not a lot is worth the trouble – school, homework, remembering to eat. Returning Alli's calls, though Vanessa showing up the other day unceremoniously with Jayden has made that less of a problem than he thought; he can't not return a call she never sends.

The phone on his bedside table is glowing, the message light blinking on the screen with unread texts. He could go through them, but the idea of having to answer Vanessa is a lot less attractive than actually doing it; good thing right now happens to be one of those horrible nightmare hours for everyone else, who should be asleep. Somewhere across town, she's sleeping beside his son; doesn't want Dallas but wants him to return her calls. For now, he keeps the phone on silent and the messages unread, though there's only so long he can keep that up before she shows again.

The clock ticks through the walls, and the A/C clicks on, roaring the room to life. The cold air rushes down to him and he pulls the covers over himself. But then they start to feel too heavy, and they make him itch. He gives up, defeated, sprawling out on top of the bed. Lets the cold envelope him, the darkness wrap itself around him like barbed wire and tear at open wounds. His eyes don't shut, but the haze of sleep is settling over him, and soon he's struggling to row himself to shore through the swampy dimness of his own dreams. Except for the trilling of the bird, the world is closed to him, silent as a grave.

**III.**

She presses the snooze three times before her dad says he'll take her in late. Instead of taking a shower, she sits in her bathrobe and watches _The Backyardigans_ while eating dry cereal out of a paper cup. It leaves sugary residue on her fingers, which she wipes on the arm of the couch. The windows to the bonus room are shut, and light flashes across the blank walls like symbols she doesn't care to try and figure out and thinks they're made up, anyway.

When her dad makes her get up and put some shoes on, she grabs her backpack and spends ten minutes looking for her calculator. She doesn't have algebra until tomorrow. When her dad has had enough sitting in the yard, he honks the horn twice, and Maya hears her mom calling from the bedroom to get moving before she misses another class.

Maya grabs her hat, forgets the gloves. She walks towards the car, stopping a minute to look at Katie's potted plants, sitting in the mudroom. They're on the windowsill, soaking in the glow of the morning, each rustle they make like a breath in the sweet spring air.

"I might not ever come back," she tries.

The flowers breathe at her. She goes back inside, grabs her coat, forgets her hat.

**IV.**

Vanessa has been trying to get a hold of him all morning, but he's kept his phone on silent. The little light blinks inside the pocket of his jeans, reminding him that he can only avoid her for so long.

In the hallway, Alli is talking to Clare Edwards. Clare looks over and sees him, throwing him her patented look of utter disgust – damn it, and just when he thought he'd won her back over. Alli gives him a quick, timid glance over her shoulder before she obeys Clare, who's yanking her down the hallway.

He watches her go. This isn't something he has a chance of fixing. If Jayden and Vanessa hadn't already set that record straight, then the last time he spoke to Alli – it was That Day – definitely sealed the deal.

Not that she's the only one who stopped giving him the time of day. A week ago, he was one of Degrassi's most talked-about, talked-to guys. These days, only the first half is true, but for completely different reasons. The team has stopped talking to him, or even near him; whenever he enters the locker room, what little conversation there is stops automatically. Entire classrooms stiffen when he walks in, like everyone's holding their breaths. No one will look him in the eye, not even teachers. People cross the halls to get away from him, scoot their desks away from his. Death is catching, you know.

By now, everyone knows he was There. The details vary from person to person, but the basic knowledge that he was There is out, and when he feels their eyes on him, it's like they're seeing someone shattered; he's a broken little body on the concrete.

For an instant, there's a memory of a solid weight at his side; a remarkable, alive reality. It almost throws him off balance, the knock it gives him in the chest. The empty space beside him throbs with the energy; it's a pulse in the air, pulling at the gravity, trying to form something from the nothing, from the _need_.

_The blood was black_. He wants to tell them, but he doesn't. _The blood was black. You think it's red, but that's only when you cut your finger or skin your knee. _

_The blood was black, but when I looked, I could see the sky in it. _

**V.**

The first day back is just like she imagined, only a thousand times worse: whispers crawling from every hidden crevice and dark space, like bugs or ghosts surrounding her. Conversations derail instantly; eyes stare at her in morbid fascination, or worse, accusation. Some have pity in their eyes, but that makes her the angriest of all.

Everyone, however, stares at her like she's drenched in blood. Like she's standing over a body, holding the knife that just went into its back.

Close enough.

Tori slips an arm around her shoulders. "Just look ahead," she says, and shoots some gawking Grade 11 boys a "what the hell are you looking at?" stare. They back off, and Maya almost laughs. Good old Tori. She's sorry she ignored her.

But even looking in front, with Tristan and Tori flanking either side, can't help. Teachers pass her by with an expression of hopeless wonder, like they want to comfort her but also want to know what happened. Obviously, they know she was dating Him. And they'd all been at that disastrous pep rally, the one That Day.

Then Tori falters, and Tristan goes, "uh-oh" under his breath.

Maya sees him before it registers with her who she's looking at – black jeans and a faded jacket, dark hair unbrushed and the greenish remnants of one hell of a beatdown still decorating one side of his face; a flag flying high in the faceless sea of backpacks and condemnation.

Maya doesn't realize she's come to a stop until someone runs into her back and yells, "watch out!". Tori pulls them all aside, then adjusts her backpack straps, as if adjusting her resolve.

"Give me a minute," she says.

"Tor, no," Maya tries, but Tori's already halfway down the hall.

Zig doesn't look up at his ex-girlfriend until Tori forces herself right in front of him, and even then he does his best to look away.

"Do you want to get going?" Tristan asks.

Maya watches them – Tori is trying to talk to him, but Zig just purses his lips and doesn't change the expression of blank intensity. Then he shifts, and his eyes find Maya's – one brown and the other still swollen and smeared with purple edges, right on hers.

Just like that, she can't breathe.

"Let's go," she says, and Tristan looks all too happy to bail. They leave what used to be the rest of their group behind, Tori still trying to get Zig's attention and Zig looking at Maya like she's all that's in the room.


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's Note: For the Ice Hound conversation in this chapter – I know absolutely NOTHING about hockey, so please forgive anything I say that sounds incredibly stupid. I was trying to write around it without having to show how ignorant I am. **

**Twitter: AlbatrossTam14**

**Tumblr: welldeservedobscurity**

**I don't own Degrassi.**

**I.**

She would spend every lunch hour in the band room if she could, but Tristan and Tori force her to eat lunch with them. Force her to eat, period. Zig she hasn't seen since the hallway on that first day, except for in class, and even then Tori serves as a buffer between him and her. He doesn't come to lunch with them, and she doesn't see him at band practice.

Course, she'd actually have to _go_ to band practice to see whether or not he's there.

Other than Tori's chatter about yoga class and Sizzle Teen's latest issue while trying to inspire Tris to go on about _West Drive_, things stay quiet around their table. She gums her way through strawberry applesauce despite the concrete lodged in her throat. She can't really taste it (though she doesn't taste much of anything these days), but it's less difficult to swallow than most food suddenly is.

She didn't realize she'd been holding her breath until she feels the burn licking her chest. She gasps, nearly choking on applesauce that bleeds down the front of her sweater. It doesn't escape Tristan and Tori, who look at her with white faces.

"What's wrong?" Tori's voice goes off like a siren.

She coughs. "Nothing," She wheezes. "Just the wrong pipe."

Tori watches her for a moment, then snatches a napkin and blots Maya's shirt. "Here," she says.

Maya grabs it out of her hand. "I got it."

"No, it's okay, I can get it…"

"Tor!" Maya crumples the napkin in her palm. "I got it."

Tori's hand freezes in midair, then retracts back to her side. "Okay," she says quietly.

Maya keeps eating, but has to remember to breathe. When did multi-tasking get so hard? Put food in mouth. Swallow. Take a breath. Repeat ad nauseam. One, two, three.

She catches Tristan staring, and when Maya follows his eyes she spots Zig. He's sitting with his friend, Damon, and a few other Grade 9 boys by the vending machine. Zig doesn't seem to be talking much, but he smiles at a joke someone makes.

Tristan gives Maya a wary look. "Do you think you should talk to him?" he whispers.

"No. And why are you whispering?"Maya swats him. "Talk normal. Act normal."

"Well, Maya…" he trails off, staring at the fruit salad in front of him. "Things aren't really _normal_." He says the words in air-quotes.

Now it's Tori's turn to smack him. "Tris!"

"Thanks, Tris," Maya says. "That's just what I needed to hear."

Tristan rubs the red spot on his arm. "Fine. Let's talk about something else."

"I heard Rachel Ferrer is getting a boob job for her eighteenth birthday," Tori says. This old bit of gossip used to light her eyes up, but now she throws them around half-heartedly, like she's sick and doesn't quite have the energy to do it all the way.

"The one who has two different sized boobs?" Tristan says. "I think, in her case, it can only help."

"I think my sister and Jake are getting back together," Maya says, apropos of nothing.

"Seriously?" Now _that's_ more like the old Tori. "When? Why?"

Maya shrugs, picking through the bag of grapes her mom packed. "I don't know. He came over last night and the night before that. And Katie started working in the garden again."

"And they just made up after that huge fight?" Tori asks.

Maya shrugs again. "Guess so."

She can't see him, but she knows Zig is still looking at her. She wishes he would just stop. For a moment, she gets mental picture of herself going over to his table and just throwing the rest of her lunch in his face. Then yelling at him until he stops staring at her for good.

_Why didn't you just listen to me when I said it was over?_ She'd grab his stupid jacket and shake him by the neck until his head snapped back and forth, until he shook like a rag doll, keep shaking him, howling, screaming in the ruined watercolor of his face. _I told you that it had to end. And you didn't listen. **Why didn't you listen?**_

She'd probably get away with it, all things considered. Isn't that why everyone's staring at her all the time? Why Tristan and Tori are always on either side? Why Katie barely lets her use the bathroom by herself? Because they all think that she'll do something crazy. Kill someone if she hears His name mentioned. Or, more likely, take the first flying leap she can out the closest open window. She heard Simpson put two padlocks on the roof door, now.

She stands up so fast that her bag of grapes spills into her lap, scattering them at her feet.

Tori cranes her neck. She's already spotted Zig, who looks away hurriedly.

"Wait, Maya…" She reaches for her frantically.

Maya steps away. "I'm just going to pee, Tor. I think I still remember how to do that."

Tori sits back in her seat. Maya turns, leaving the cafeteria. This time, she knows she isn't imagining things – the caf has gone silent with her footsteps, every pair of eyes watching her as a thousand questions ring muted through the air.

Maya keeps her head up at the doors, doesn't rush her steps. Everyone expects her to be some insane grieving widow? Well, they can go to Hell. When she reaches the caf doors, she pushes them open and strides through them without looking back, before any of their questions can get free.

**II.**

Right on cue, the murmurs of conversation he hears from the locker room stop when he enters. Words peter off mid-sentence, and everyone suddenly becomes fascinated with tying their skate laces.

Dallas lets it – tries to – slide off his back like rain. He goes to his own locker, stripping out of his school clothes and into the familiar scent of his hockey gear. Stale sweat and pure adrenaline; victory and dirty socks. No matter how many times Mrs. Torres washed it for him with that detergent that smelled like oranges, the smell never came out. All it did was make his jersey smell like rotted fruit.

Two lockers down from him is the empty space of an unopened locker. The combination lock still hangs on the door, as if daring them to open it up.

_Try and guess my secrets, _it taunts.

Dallas wonders when Coach will empty it out. He's already retiring His number, sending the jersey back to His family.

He's there now: morning outside a red brick church. The grey-faced father. The mother whose face he never saw; she had her face buried in her husband's arms the entire service, until she disappeared somewhere and left the rest of her family behind. The oldest boy, who looked Dallas's age, broad and blond. The little girl who looked about ten, with dark brown hair in two long braids over her shoulders. She looked like some old picture stepped straight out of one of his history textbooks, the image of someone lost to time and tragedy. And the youngest one, the boy who was being stared at the entire day, because he looked just like Him. The same dark eyes, the same color hair, the same small, tilted face. Now it held the same sadness. It was a shrunken image that made everyone stare in agonized fascination. Even Dallas stopped short when he saw the kid, and promptly ran into Luke's backside. Luke had shot him a dirty look, and behind him, Dalton pushed him forward with a "move it, dude". Coach had been watching them from their place in the stands; the Ice Hounds had been designated to their own row in the church, and they filed in one after the other, a wall of stoic faces and red ties. Coach's idea, just like the black armbands they would all wear during the game against Westview in two weeks.

He can taste the iron in the air from that morning. Feel the dirt under his black dress shoes, feel the mud on the wet hems of his good pants Mrs. T had just ironed the night before. The sky had been steel-colored, hard and unforgiving. A mockery of the mornings just before it, when the sky had been so perfectly blue that it seemed like Toronto would never suffer through cold again. It was that hopeful, that serene. But that grey morning overlooking a cemetery turned everything around them the same bleak color of the sky, with no blue to be seen. Like the entire world had shut its eyes to the day, not wanting to see what had become of it.

His phone buzzes at the bottom of his bag. He knows it's Vanessa without having to look. He grabs it to switch it off, when he sees the message on the screen:

_Tmrw night. You cant keep blowing me off. _

He stares down at her words for a long time. An image of Jayden rises, unbidden. He's much younger. He's fussing after a nap. As if he had a bad dream, and trying to shake it off. Or maybe he doesn't know what dreams are, and he's trying to figure out if the world he woke up in is as solid as it looks or if it's all just shadows and edges, nothing like it should be.

Pushes that image down. Pushes. Away.

_Yeah_, he texts back quickly. _Txt me ltr with details._

"You got any ideas, Captain?"

Dallas looks up. Cody is talking to him, but staring at his hands as he pulls on his gloves.

The rest of the team is trying not to look at him.

Dallas shakes his head. "Nothing new. Just keep the same formation we've been using."

"We were thinking about putting Luke back on right wing," Matt says. For a minute he looks at Dallas, then looks away quickly. "He's the best right shooter we have…" Matt gulps. "Now. And he was playing right wing at the start of the season."

Dallas shrugs. "Then put him on right wing." He looks over at Luke. "That work for you?"

Luke stares at his knee pads. "It's what we all talked about, yeah."

"Then I guess you don't really need my opinion, do you?"

The room ripples with silence. Words stick in between their teeth, rotting away as they lace up and grab their sticks.

The ice looks just the same as ever. It gleams, untouched, under the stadium lights. Their steps echo through the empty stadium. It always amazes Dallas, how small the arena looks when it isn't packed with people. The place seems to shrink ten times when it's just them, the sound of their sticks slapping the ice and the smooth glide of their blades, crossing the surface like fault lines.

They circle the ice like birds, red flashes in a colorless sky. Dashing and darting, drills and plays memorized, simple twists and turns and speed as they rise, fly, soar. The memorized dance calms him. It's instinct, at this point. _Head up, stick on the ice._ Slowly, the rank taste of iron fades off his tongue, and the grey hillside recedes to the smooth emptiness of the ice. Nothing but the roar of his heart, the rhythm of his own breath, the heat of sweat already slipping down his skin. _Push forward, don't stop. Keep up the hustle._ It pushes everything else out of his mind, and he shakes off the hillside like forgetting a dream; letting go of the tatters that cling to waking. _This is here, this is pain, this is real_. Nothing but the wind of movement in his ears, the smell of the cool ice, and the sweet ache in his limbs. _Keep going._

**III.**

As far as Maya can tell these days, her sister and her sister's ex are working through erratic hours to keep mutual custody of their nursery. Like, in return for her time with the rhododendrons, Katie listens to Jake talk about summer squash. And they _don't _spend the entire time wishing they could shove their tongues down each other's throats.

Katie used to just walk there, but since Jake broke his Spring Break-imposed exile a few days ago, he just comes to pick her up. Maya's watching TV and inhaling a mushroom pizza when she sees her sister come to the door in eye shadow and mud boots.

"You know there's a place on Valley Street selling hyacinth bulbs for eight dollars?" she hears Jake say, as soon as her sister opens the door.

Maya can smell the waft from the truck all the way at the couch. The bed is filled with fertilizer and bursting sunsets that wave to her from outside the window. She gets up and closes the blinds, the light slanting across the dusty floor like knives.

"Think you might have gone a touch overboard?" Katie laughs. She bats at the air, waving away the scent. Maya rolls her eyes.

There's a moment Maya sees where Jake and Katie look at each other, both grinning. They hold it for just a second, then it evaporates. Jake looks down at the doormat, and Katie's eyes linger a second longer than they should before she turns away.

"Feel like tagging along, Maya?"

She blinks. "Uhh, no, thanks." There's a serious magnetic pull towards her dark bedroom. She can see the door from here, the shadows beckoning for her in the unwashed sheets.

"Just for an hour or two?" Katie asks. "Come on, Maya. We could really use the help."

Maya puts down the rest of her uneaten pizza. The act alone suddenly makes her feel exhausted. "No offense, Katie, but I don't think I'll ever be THAT bored."

"What are you gonna do, sleep? It's four thirty in the afternoon."

She stops in the hallway to stare Katie down. "And I'm _tired._"

Katie stares back at her. She's got her Ferocious Look on, but it takes a lot more than that to send Maya scampering. It hasn't really worked on her since she was about seven; she doesn't know why Katie still uses it.

"Fine," Katie relents. "Just tell Mom I'll be back by dinner."

Maya waves one hand in the air, already turning to her bedroom. She can smell the sheets from here, the scent of unwashed hair and restlessness. She lets the bedroom door click shut, then pulls the rumpled comforter over her eyes. It's comforting, the sourness of the smell and the dark snugness, the way the sheets don't expect her to do anything but lie there and breathe. In and out, in and out, the sheets tightening around her as she holds herself together.

She stares up at her ceiling. Since she was seven, she's had these plastic stars above her bed, the kind that glow in the dark. She thinks her dad bought them at the dollar store. They make a smiley-face pattern when they light up in the darkness, on the nightscape of her ceiling. They had been there forever, until one day one of them fell, shortening her constellation. She figured it had become unstuck and plunged into the unmade sea of her bed, then sucked up accidentally by the vacuum when her mom made her clean her room.

Occasionally, when she'd turn off the lights and try to sleep at night, she'd look at the blank space where that fallen star used to be and remember its place in her little galaxy. It was automatic, a reflex, even if only the shadow of the star remained.

Her arm reaches up. One eye closed, she traces the low, colorless skyline, trying to guess a shape in the popcorned blankness.

At night, stars drift into the darkness overhead, completing a circle around the sun. The same thing happens during the day, but without the cover of night, we can't see them shine.

The people who heard "he was depressed" seemed happier. It's a logical cause – not contagious, not cancerous. Relief on their faces : ahh, of course. Not something dangerous in all their minds. He was _depressed_.

This is important to people. Things have names. Names make sense. Names don't leave everyone raw, exposed, vulnerable. Names help.

She glances at her stars, one lost. No sun for them; the orbit of her ceiling just stays there, frozen in place and memory.

**IV.**

The bird lives in the branch outside his window. He saw it this morning before school, when he was climbing into Mrs. T's car behind Adam. The bird that sings every night, trilling on a sprawling limb in the shadows of the morning. It had the color of the sunrise on its wings, and flew into the east as if to bring the city its dawn.

On the edge of darkness, clouds are soaring above buildings huddled together like they just survived something. The sky is bloody, the sun losing its battle with the oncoming night.

They picked a neutral place, a restaurant close to her hotel. Jayden ran to him, just like before. Dallas met him before the boy could run the short distance; he didn't trust the boy not to trip over his short legs and hurt himself. It overrode the momentary insanity of actually being around Jayden; before he could ask himself what the hell he was doing, the first thought that popped into his mind – after _holy shit don't fall_ – was _holy shit, that kid got big_.

And before he had a second to second-guess it, he had Jayden, and picked him up so they were face to face. For the first time, in almost two years. Dallas had looked at him, not seeing much of himself. But not much of Vanessa, either. He was a warm and sure weight in his arms, and the sturdy realness of the boy was oddly comforting.

He wanted to be held up, but Dallas gave him back to Vanessa. She kept him held on her waist; Jayden's legs were so long they could wrap around her middle.

"So," she says, once they settle into a booth, "the famous Mike Dallas." Her hands clasp over the booth. "Making time out of his busy life for some girl who had his kid."

His hands go around the sides of his water. When he pulls them back, he sees his own handprints in the condensation.

"You wanted me here," he says. "You got me. Why are you here?"

She sighs. "You're not much of a host. Oh wait, I knew that from the other day. What was her name? Alli?"

"I thought this was between you and me," he says, narrowing his eyes at her.

"Did you really like her? She sure seemed into you." Vanessa rolls her eyes. "You're still exactly the same, aren't you."

Dallas leans closer to her across the table. "Did you actually want something, or did you just come here to take shots?"

She picks the cherry tomatoes off the top of her salad and puts them aside. He didn't remember she didn't like tomatoes.

"As a matter of fact," she says after a moment, "I did come here for something." She looks up at him. "You remember my aunt and uncle?"

He shrugs. "Why?"

"They offered to adopt Jayden when I was pregnant. And for a while I thought I'd do it, but right before I had him, I changed my mind."

Vanessa takes one of the cherry tomatoes off the plate and starts peeling the soft skin with her long fingernails.

"My family and I have been talking," she says. "For a long time."

She picks at the tomato too hard, and it bleeds onto her hands.

"I want them to adopt him."

Dallas stares at her for a long moment. Vanessa looks away, her eyes focused on the hazy window, the world spiraling into night around them.

"You're serious?" he says finally.

She nods. "Yeah."

She's still sticking the tomato with her fingers. Beside her, Jayden is playing with her phone, pressing all the buttons. It sounds like a drunk xylophone.

"They said they're still interested in doing it, and we'd still be living in the same area. He'd still see me, still see my mom and my grandma." She stares at her hands, now covered in tomato juice.

"He'd have a good life there," she adds, but he can barely hear her; it's like she's talking more to herself now.

His eyes slide back to Jayden. He's still banging away at her phone, letting out a shriek when something lights up.

Vanessa shakes her head a moment, then suddenly sits upright, brisk and bristling once more. Her face rearranges itself into her first expression of bitter indifference towards him.

"I came here," she says, "because I need your consent for the adoption. The lawyer we talked to said that if my aunt and uncle are going to adopt Jayden, they need both parents to sign off on it. Both have to give up their rights."

He's still speechless as she reaches into her purse.

"I brought the paperwork and everything. The guy at the courthouse said that we both need to sign here, saying that we surrender our rights as parents up completely." She looks up at him for a moment, as if weighing what she wants to say next, then adds, "I figured that shouldn't be too hard for you, since you've been doing that since before he was born."

"Hold on a minute," he says. He's still trying to wrap his head around her words. "You're serious about this."

She nods without looking at him. "Why else would I drive all the way here? I didn't want to deal with you, believe me. But I need to, for this."

"And you're just signing a piece of paper and that's that?"

She shrugs one shoulder. "Generally how it works."

He glances at Jayden. "I don't get it. Why now? Why wait till he's almost two? Why not back then?"

Vanessa finally looks him in the eyes. "Why do you care?" she snaps. "You have no business judging me for this."

"I'm not! I just want to know! Why come to me now about all this?"

Vanessa suddenly looks around, and Dallas notices what she does – people are staring.

She grabs Jayden and pulls him out of the booth, ignoring his whine of protest.

"Outside," she grits through her teeth.

Leaving some money for the bill on the table, Dallas follows her out the door and to the small park across the street. She stops by a small pond, where Jayden tries to reach in and grab one of the fish with his bare hands.

"So," she says. "Any chance you can at least pretend to care about your son's future?"

He shakes his head. "You're not making any sense."

"What part doesn't make sense? I'm giving you a one-time shot to be done with us forever. I thought, after avoiding us for so long, you'd jump at the chance."

"Then why do you even need my permission, if you hate me so much?"

"I told you," she snaps, "it's a legal thing. The court needs us both to sign off as parents."

"So you just show up here and dump this on me?" he says, a little louder than he meant to. Jayden looks up at him, and Dallas looks away.

"Oh, I'm sorry to threaten your _career,"_ she says, sneering in italics. "But as he's your freaking kid, I still need it."

He rounds on her, glaring. "And you're sure about that?"

For a minute, it looks like she'll slap him. She's definitely thinking it, he can tell. He almost takes a step back. Then Jayden starts running towards the water, and she yanks him back by the shirt before he can get any closer.

"Come on, Vaness," he says. "You even _told_ me you weren't sure."

Vanessa leans against the fence and stares at the park. "You're a fucking asshole."

His eyes shift to Jayden, watching the ducks on the grey water. He startles every time their wings suddenly erupt from their sides, like black smoke igniting.

Vanessa's eyes follow his, and she shrugs. She pulls out a cigarette, lighting it and twisting it in her long fingers. Smoke curls around her hands like a halo. Her hands are never still for long; he'd forgotten that about her, too. "He's not listening. And you're still an asshole."

Dallas shrugs. "Call it like you want it."

Vanessa takes another drag. "I am." Turns to Jayden, staring at that water in the boneless way only small children seem to have – squatting down, butt straight out, feet flat and shoulder-length apart.

She suddenly turns towards Dallas, holding out her pack.

He almost laughs at that. "Still don't smoke."

Vanessa runs a hand through her hair. Her lips curl downward, a scowl trying to be a scowl even though it's fighting to be something else. For a minute, they just stare at the concrete world of the city turning to shadows, tumbling into a sky that changes from red to gold to purple. Like tapestry, like royalty. Like a dream; nothing looks solid anymore.

"Thought you quit," he says, breaking their heavy pause.

She shrugs, eyes still on Jayden.

"I did," she murmurs.

She peers at him, hair glowing gold, and he almost smiles at her.

Then it's gone. She straightens up, hair blowing back, and puffs smoke into the horizon.

He shakes his head. "Are we done here?"

"Sure," she says. She laughs, her eyes gone hard and flinty, and stubs out the rest of her cigarette. "Yeah. We're done here. Mr. Big Star. Have a nice night."

She picks up Jayden, who whines in protest. "Bird!" he yelps, pointing at the birds retreating on the water.

"Birds later," Vanessa dismisses. She hoists the boy on her hip, then after a beat, says, "Say bye-bye to Daddy."

Jayden grins. The shadows curl off his face, the last of the sunlight trying to cling to his smile.

"Daddy!"

Dallas isn't really sure how much Jayden understands about it all. He knows a good handful of words, but the concepts of meaning and conversation are lost on him for the most part. He tosses words like skipped stones or confetti. They sparkle and sink, without a response to be given.

Jayden still reaches for him over Vanessa's shoulder. "Daddy!" he repeats.

Dallas could say something to him. The boy's dark eyes are shifting in the darkness crawling towards them across the city, black pools in the awful twilight.

Vanessa looks over her shoulder at him. He turns before their eyes match. The cold sweeps over the park, sudden as death, and threatens to blow him apart.

The bird doesn't come that night. He should have known that it wouldn't, when he saw it fly away that morning. Nothing ever comes back, not once it's gone.

**V.**

The night is a guardian. Darkness keeps her eyes dim and sheltered, silence a warm blanket after shock. The stars are out tonight, their ragged mendings the edges of hours slipping too slowly by.

She hunches in the oversized sweatshirt from one of Katie's old soccer teams and opens her bedroom window. Briefly, she considers climbing out the window, trying to chase down her moon, but the temperature suddenly shot down this afternoon, and now people are calling for snow. In April.

Snow this late isn't unheard of, but after a mild winter, the sudden nakedness of a world frozen – the closed-off blankness of the sky, the wind once so furious now hushed into a silence so complete it's violent – is almost cruel.

A few weeks ago, there were greens shooting up to reach a sky bright as a smile. Days smelled sweet and blossoms were just coming back. Now it's gone. Cold and cutting as dashed hope.

A sudden wind comes through her window, and a chill goes through the fabric of the overwashed sweatshirt straight to her bones, freezing her blood like glass. It's the smell of a frozen world; the misty burn of ice that always followed Him. It lingered on Him like an illness, no matter how long he spent off the rink; a smell that was like old snow and utter silence; like winter that feels like it will never feel the sun again.

Something may have been enough. After all, she got him to sing karaoke with her – not a small feat. He came to all her band shows, held her hand in the hallway. She laughed with him during _Modern Family_ and made pancakes for dinner when they studied together after school. She texted him good night every night before bed, and he fell asleep with her on the couch, fingers intertwined, while she listened to the sound of his heart thudding through warm, fresh cotton.

What had she even been, when they slept on the couch together? Was she his girlfriend still, then? Or was she his buffer, his security blanket, his dreamcatcher?

Her hands are sweaty as they grip the window sill. She's always sweating, these days. Sometimes she takes two showers a day, and she still feels soaked in sweat, her heart beating too fast to cool herself down. Can you have a heart attack at fourteen? Of course you can; Tristan did. Is she about to have one, too?

A warm hand creeps over her heart under a flimsy t-shirt, and it races in her hand like a fugitive. Sweat is trickling down her chest. Breathe.

She looks out her window. All stars, stars, stars. From where she sits, it looks as if they begin right at the edge of her house, and end somewhere over the sugar maple shadows, at the edge of where she can see. The entire universe, sitting comfortably above her.


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's Note: Thank you for all the wonderful words about this story. Everyone who keeps reading and supporting is awesome, and I appreciate every single bit of it =)**

**Twitter: AlbatrossTam14 (protected tweets)**

**Tumblr: welldeservedobscurity**

**I don't own Degrassi.**

**I.**

Maya hears the snow before she sees it – the wild wind howling outside her window. She pokes the blinds open and takes a look outside. Sure enough, no sunshine to be seen. Cold wind, and an even colder sky. A world overnight turned to ice and silence.

For some reason, it makes her feel awake. Like the cold is a shot, jolting right through her bones, sunlight poured in a cup of coffee. It's like time rewound itself somehow, back to the days of winter that tumbled into equally dark nights before tripping into harsh daylight again.

Time to get up, she tells herself. No more acting like a zombie. It's time to be Maya again.

She's up and dressed in school clothes before her alarm even goes off. For some reason, she's even inspired to flat-iron her hair, something she hasn't wasted her time with in ages. Even makes her bed for the first time in weeks – okay, well, smoothes over the sheets. Not perfect, but it looks tidy, at least.

The new Maya, she thinks. Even puts on a pair of earrings that look like silver guitars. Get ready, get set, go.

The new Maya peeks at the snow outside the kitchen window. The wind has died down some, and skinny fragments light try to fight their way through the thick clouds. The trees on either side of the street hang low and heavy, covered in wet clumps. In the silver light, they glow like obelisks, surrounding the roads in silent memorial.

She startles when the coffee pings behind her and her dad comes into the kitchen. He does a double-take when he sees her.

"Maya-May," he says. "You look…up."

She shrugs. "I am up."

"I mean," her dad says, pouring himself a cup of coffee, "you look good." He smiles at her. "It's nice to see you up and at it."

Maya just looks back out the window. "It's almost time to leave."

Behind her, Katie's footsteps trail into the kitchen, then stop abruptly.

"Whoa." Katie's eyebrows hit the ceiling when she sees her. "Look who dragged herself out of bed before noon."

Maya sighs. "Whatever. Can we go? I told Tori we could have breakfast."

"You're eating breakfast, too?" Katie laughs. "Someone's in a good mood."

She puts her hands on her hips. "Some reason why I shouldn't be? I thought everyone wanted me up. Well, I'm up. Now can we go already?"

Katie looks away. Her dad puts his half-finished coffee down and heads out the door.

"I'm gonna go brush the car off," he says. "Katie, wanna help?"

"In a minute," she says.

When the kitchen door swings shut behind him, Katie reaches out to her. She makes a move like she'll touch Maya's shoulder, but instead stops just short of it, and her hand rests inside the pocket of her jeans instead.

"Maya," Katie says quietly, "chill. It was a joke. I'm glad you're eating breakfast with Tori. I'm glad you're feeling better. I just want you to feel like you're getting things back together."

Maya doesn't answer. Her eyes focus on the pattern of the granite countertop. Feeling better.

**II.**

Like that, a snowstorm hits. In April.

Dallas wakes up that morning to the wind, screaming so loudly he thinks at first that it's a person. After such a mild winter, a storm so strong out of nowhere seems like a punishment.

The window to his bedroom is almost obliterated, so he looks out the porch glass door instead. Sure enough, it looks like a January night out there – no sign of the beautiful spring that they all soaked in just a few days ago.

He stands there for a minute, just watching the snow. Something so wild about it. The wind picks up huge drifts of fallen sky and hurls them against the door, making it rattle, as if showing how easily something that looks so solid can shatter.

Dallas hesitates just a moment, then stuffs his bare feet into his sneakers by the door. He slips out, trying not to let the wind slam the door shut behind him, and stands on the back patio, watching the storm.

It takes a second to really register how cold it's become; how hard the wind is. Standing on the Torres's patio in only his shorts and sneakers, he lets the snow hit him like heat, like a knife twisting deep in his gut. Hurts, but he sucks in his breath. It licks his bare chest like a flame, burning, twisting, but leaving no mark for the flash of pain.

He stands there in the wind for as long as he can stand it, the world turned grey around him, feeling like the last man in the universe.

**III.**

They're reading_ Antigone _in English, and she hasn't cracked the spine. There's a quiz today, so she might want to get started on that, but distracts herself with a handful of Cheetos instead. English isn't until sixth period, anyway.

The cheesy dust gets on her hands, wedging itself into her fingerprints like a stain. She brings her hands closer to her, studying the way it cakes into the rivulets of her skin, the way her palms are banded with lines that intersect and disappear into each other. The fluorescent lights above her are too bright; she can see the veins under the thin skin of her wrist, rivering into her hand under the life line –

"_Made you laugh, Cheesy!" _

"Maya?"

She blinks. The fluorescent lights. Blinks. "Yeah."

Tori is watching her. Her eyes are tilted downwards, her mouth pursed. For good measure, Maya wipes her hands on the napkin at the bottom of her lunchbag.

"I heard the new Chris Hemsworth movie comes out this weekend," Tori says finally. "We should go Friday night. All of us."

Tristan actually claps his hands. "Oooh, good idea! I heard it's in his contract that he has to be shirtless for 2/3rds of the movie."

"I love that!" Tori shrieks. "Ooh, and we can all go for sushi before, and Maya, you could come to my house late, stay the night, maybe."

She wipes off the last bit of powder on the leg of her jeans. "No thanks."

The air goes out of Tristan, and he looks to Tori for more.

"You should come," Tori says. "It would be good to get out."

"I get out."

"With who?"

Maya is already scrambling to her feet. "_Really_ not in the mood, Tor."

Tori doesn't push. "Maybe just sushi?" she offers meekly.

Maya shrugs without turning back to look at them. "See you guys later."

She's ten paces ahead of them before either can argue, and she keeps pushing, listening for footsteps behind her and not a little disappointed when there are none. She slows her power-march to a slow shuffle, walking past the rows of lockers and idle chatter that suddenly begins to wither as she passes. Like the wind outside this morning; she is winter, and they are all that grows.

"Maya!"

For a second, she isn't sure if she's imagining it or not. She turns around slowly, then breathes a sigh of – Relief? Disappointment? – when it's Mo that's calling her.

Mo notices she stopped and smiles at her, then when he reaches her she watches the grin slide off his face. She's seen this happen so many times now. People don't know what to say. Or worse, they say something about how he's "in a better place", "no longer in pain", and "it was his choice, you know? What he wanted."

"_I'll always want you."_

But most of the time they just look at her with a mixture of pity, curiosity, and, usually, fear. The last time Mo spoke to her was at the funeral, and even then he looked like he wanted nothing more to do than run away as he bent down to hug her and whisper, "sorry about your boyfriend" into her ear.

She waits for Mo to shift from one foot to the other, adjust his backpack straps, and grin down at her again. "Hi."

She pains a smile. "Hey yourself."

Gives him time to study his hands. Weigh his words.

"So," he says, "how's…Whisperhug's next big hit coming?"

She looks up at him, and suddenly he looks alarmed.

"Not that you need to be writing one," he rushes. "You don't need to be doing anything at all; look, I'm stupid, okay, pretend I didn't say anything, take as much time as you need to write something; you know, if you even want to write something…"

"No," she says, giving him the mercy of a cut-off. It's funny; she has come to wonder why she's the one who ends up offering her own form of comfort when people come to give her their own. They all want to say the "right thing" to help her – want to "be there", that phrase again – but it's her that ends up leading them to it, usually. It's like going to your own birthday party and bringing everyone their own private cake.

Irony. Ms. Dawes would be proud of her, using the term correctly.

She pushes that insane thought aside.

"I've been working on some stuff," she says. A half-lie; she _had_ been writing a lot over Spring Break, but now it's all somewhere in the mess crawling on her bedroom floor.

"That's good!" Mo says it like a cheer. "Stuff is good. Stuff is…"

But apparently he can't find another word for that "stuff" is, so he just looks down the hallway and says, "yeah…"

"Nothing's really finished," she goes on, "but I did get a lot of writing done over Spring Break. I can show you the sheet music some time, if you want. Maybe bring it to school, we can look it over?"

"Yeah!" Mo says, too brightly again. "That sounds, that sounds great. I'd love to see what you've been working on. Sure it's a big hit."

He smiles like something's wedging his lips out, and Maya gives him a smile back.

"Well," Mo says, "I should really get going. Class." He points down the busy hallway. "It'll start soon." He adjusts his backpack again and ducks his head to the floor, avoiding eye contact.

She watches him go. Just before he turns into a classroom, he pauses and turns back around to her. His face isn't the painful smile earlier, but looks more drawn. He looks a lot more comfortable and honest, now that there's some distance between them.

"Good to talk to you, Maya," he says.

For a moment, it's all she can do to just stand there. Without warning or preamble her eyes mist over and something blossoms in her throat. She feels almost overwhelmed by the gesture.

Before Mo goes inside, she waves to him, and Mo waits an awkward second before waving back.

Just like that, whatever spell she just snapped into is broken, and she shakes it off.

Waving? What the hell was that? Stupid, stupid, stupid. It's like she doesn't speak Regular People anymore.

She stomps down the hallway, hands shoved in her pockets, muttering _stupid, stupid, stupid_ under her breath. Thuds into Perino's class, still mumbling and storming, a second too late.

"Ms. Matlin," Perino says drily. "Glad you could grace us with your presence. Five points off your quiz today for being late. Take a seat."

Maya slips in her chair. Everyone's still staring – with her wind-wild hair and coming in still talking to herself, she must have looked like some crazy bag lady, just trailing into class like that. Oh, well. The whole school thinks she's going to go insane any second now and just slit her throat in the middle of class or something, so why not look the part of a crackpot.

She keeps her eyes glued to the board, pretending to be absorbed in the lecture. Perino is the only teacher in the school – he's about the only _person_ in the school – who doesn't treat her any differently. He still talks to her with that same tone of annoyed indifference, still demands everything on time, and still gives out detentions when she doesn't turn in her assignments. Last week she still failed one of his tests, and this week she got ten points taken off a paper for not having a work cited page stapled to the back.

These days, he's become her favorite teacher.

She's halfway Perino's lecture on ancient Mesopotamia when she realizes she left her copy of _Antigone_ in the caf with Tris and Tori. Oh, well. Her English mark is high enough; one bombed quiz won't fail her. From what she's half-listened to during class, it's about some girl who wants to bury her brother, but the king won't let her.

Notes on the board. Dates, definitions, names, history smeared across the galaxy of the white board. The markers leave lines, like the ones on her hands.

Pen slips through her fingers, too damp and loose to hold on. Notebook paper damp with her sweat curling at the edges. Ink smudged, staining and bleeding blue on her hands. Opens palms on desk. Wet. Shivering. Knees, too. Cold. So cold these days. Hides the shudders by jiggling her foot on the floor. Stares, all around her. The dampness of her hands creates glittering shadows in the valleys of her shaking skin.

Stupid. A thousand years of high school students reading pointless crap like _Antigone_. Why couldn't they read something else? Who wanted stuff like this. Words full of dead people, full of questions that didn't have answers. Full of too many words when there really weren't any to use. Too many words about something that meant _absent, nothing, gone._

**IV.**

Vanessa texts him after lunch.

_I still need the papers_. _C u tonite?_

He waits a long moment before answering, knowing he'll incite a wrath of all-caps messages.

_Cant tonite hockey free after school tmrw_

Then switches his phone off, knowing it'll blow up like New Year's when he finally turns it back on again.

As usual, everyone he passes treats him like he's the walking plague. They cross the hallways, keep their heads down. Dallas just keeps walking forward, treating it like a practice drill. Push through any pain you might feel. Don't pay attention to anything except the goal. _Keep going._

The PA system crackles to life, scaring the hell out of him.

"Will Mike Dallas come to the office, please; Mike Dallas."

In an instant, everyone who was pretending not to stare is now ogling him openly. He ignores them and heads to the door of Simpson's office.

The closer he gets to the door marked PRINCIPAL the harder his heart starts to hammer. He can feel it in the base of his throat, behind his eyes, in the drums of his ears. _Thud, thud, thud._ Louder than the wind this morning, swirling bits of the broken world around him as he watched the sky crumble.

He's only ever set foot in here once, and it was That Day.

Simpson was meeting with the chief of police and they wanted to talk to Dallas, get a statement from him. All Dallas could do was sit there and shake in a flimsy plastic chair – couldn't hear words, couldn't understand voices; felt nothing but his own heartbeat, gone as out of control as the last few minutes. Hands and feet were disconnected from the rest of his body, couldn't move them if he tried. Mouth bone dry, tongue too heavy to move, heavy, he was so heavy, swaying toward the ground. Simpson had a hand on his shoulder but he couldn't feel that, either; eyes closed because there was nothing to keep them open, and people were saying words like _witness_ and _official report _and _coroner _and _autopsy_ and he's

_Black blood on the concrete –_

At Simpson's door.

Breathes. In. Out.

In.

Door shuts. Sits down.

Simpson looks at him. "Dallas", he says.

Dallas doesn't think his face has changed much since the last time he was in here. He still looks stricken, still a few shades paler than the snow outside, and still looking at Dallas with eyes still gutted with disbelief.

"Sit down," Simpson says, and Dallas ignores the fact that he was already sitting.

Simpson stares at his clasped hands over the desk a moment, then just looks at him.

"I didn't want to ask you to do this," he begins. "But honestly, I wasn't sure where else to go."

He looks out the window, then takes a deep breath.

"I need somebody to go in and clean out Campbell Saunders' locker." The words come out in a rush. "Coach Peterman has already done his gym locker, but we'll be needing his old school books and whatever else might be school property in there. I don't know many people he was close to, other than Maya Matlin, but given certain… circumstances," his voice hitches a bit, "I thought it might not be…entirely appropriate."

He clears his throat. "I know you two were friends. And I thought maybe you might want to…if you saw something you wanted to keep…I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem."

A few weeks ago, Dallas never would have thought _friends_ would be an overstatement. But that's how quickly things can change. Still, he realizes, this is something that feels right. Feels more than right, feels _required. _It's something he' meant to do. It's suddenly the most important task in the world. More important than any game he's played, any goal he's set, anything he's ever wanted. The locker. This is his duty. Strong as truth, big as a promise; needed as a miracle.

Simpson is still talking.

"I'll give you the combination," he says. "Just box up everything that belongs to the school and we'll figure out what to do with the rest."

Simpson clears his throat again. "Is that okay?"

Dallas nods. Something is buzzing inside his head, like a bug close to his ear. When he nods his head, his it feels like someone's pulling a string."Sounds like a plan."

Simpson regards him carefully.

"Are you sure about this?" he asks, his voice almost a whisper.

Dallas nods. This time it's an effort. So off-balance, all of a sudden. The locker. What's inside. He has to. Owes it to – _who?_

Simpson hands Dallas a piece of paper with some numbers on it.

"If you decide to change your mind," he says, when Dallas reaches for the slip, "let me know."

He takes it and folds it into his pocket. "Don't worry about it," he says.

He gets up so fast that his chair bounces into the wall. Vision feels swimmy, for some reason. Feels like someone is squeezing his head on either side. Still hears buzzing. Faint.

"Dallas."

Simpson is staring at his hands again.

"When I said there would always be a place for students to talk about… " They're shaking, still clasped on the desk. "Talk about what happened…"

There's a familiar iron taste in his mouth again. He bites the inside of his cheeks; his throat closes on the metallic bitterness. Red brick church. _The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want._

"If you ever need to –" Simpson begins, but doesn't finish.

"Thanks, Mr. Simpson."Head still feels underwater. Metallic taste.

_Red brick church – The Lord is my Shepherd – we're all you've got –I shall not want – counting on you – "you did NOTHING!" – I shall not want I shall not want I shall not – whole team is – _

"But I got it under control."

He pushes out the door before either of them can say anything else. Class has begun; the hallways are bare now of gawkers, and it makes him slow his pace a bit. Head still aches, but nothing a sip of water and a few deep breaths won't cure. He's fine, he's –

_Shall not want – Head up, stick on the ice– Lord is my Shepherd –You, Cam, you – not want, not want, want –_

Fine.

**V.**

Her English teacher has revoked _Antigone_ as the reading, so it turns out that she didn't even need to worry about bombing a quiz. Instead they're reading _The Taming of the Shrew_, but they have only two weeks to read it and write the paper of it, because that was the time they had left to finish _Antigone._ Maya looks at the noticeably thicker spine, though it helps a little that the first half of the book is stuff about Shakespeare's life that she won't read and that each page she turns has a cheat sheet, telling her what all the old words mean and explaining what's happening in the story. Maybe this will be even less reading than the first book. Score.

Some kid in the front of the class asks why they have to start a new book when they didn't finish the old one; after correcting the student and calling them "dramas" instead of "books" while Maya withholds an eyeroll, the teacher demurs and says that the school board decided they needed to change their curriculum. Then she threatens them with a quiz, so they shut up.

The bell rings, and Maya follows the rest of the class out. Her teacher tries to make a move like she'll stop her, but Maya rushes into the crowd like she saw someone she knew, and the teacher doesn't try to stop her.

When she's clear out of the teacher's range, she slows to a normal pace behind two girls, trying to hide behind their height and argyle sweaters. She's reminded of that saying about the tree in the forest – if she doesn't see the eyes on her, is anyone looking?

Of course they are, but she still focuses on the tiles anyway, counting each time the girls in front of her step on the cracks.

"Great," one of them complains. "Now I have even more reading. Why'd they have to change it, anyway? We already bought the book."

"Do you know how _Antigone_ ends?" the other girl says. "Everyone commits suicide. I bet they changed it because that hockey guy killed himself."

"Oh my god," Girl #2 whispers loudly. "Isn't his girlfriend in our class?"

The other girl is busy staring at her cell phone. "Yeah. She's the blonde with the greasy hair. I bet the teacher changed it just for her."

The other girl blinks. "Oh my god," she repeats. Then they walk down the hallway, turning into the art room.

Maya doesn't realize she's stopped until someone runs into her backside and says, "move it!". Someone else brushes past her, and someone else pushes her aside as they rush through the crowd. Maya crashes into a locker, her full weight slamming into the metal, someone's combination lock digging into her shoulder as she tries to catch her balance on legs that suddenly feel like toothpicks. One hand reaches up and presses the door of each closed locker as she slumps against it, pressing her full weight on their calmingly solid surfaces each time she steps.

Her throat aches. It's too tight to breathe. She thinks of the stars – what she wouldn't give to be among them now. Billions and billions of lost galaxies and burning stories, their colossal fabric stitched in the complete nothingness of space.

For a minute, Maya wonders if the cracking noise she hears is all in her head, or if whatever it is that just broke inside her was loud enough for the entire school to hear, like an announcement on the PA. Her chest is crushed; she can't get any air down to her lungs. They burn, they clench, they search for a swish of air and find none. Tight, too tight. She puts a hand to her head and stares at the floor. Rolling on waves that will swallow her up and _crunchcrucncrunch_ spit her into the current. A bomb is clawing away at her insides. She is bloating, expanding, exploding from the inside out. If it goes off, it will rattle the entire school – anger, guilt, shame, grief, _why_ – and bring the whole thing down on every single person inside. It would leave a crater in the earth the size of Him, and even if she disappeared forever among the stars she would still be able to see it, like the Great Wall of China or an ocean. Would still be able to see the wreck of herself, no matter how far into the black she dove.

Her hands come up to her throat. She spins, runs. Backpack hits the ground. Abandoned. Bile burns her mouth. Eats away the concrete wedged in her throat; the acid chokes her, threatens to spew out of her. Runs through the hall, the crowd pauses but she doesn't look. Lungs being pulled right out of her chest, the empty chamber of her insides lit on fire. Runs to the handicapped bathroom near the janitor's closet and slams the door, throwing the deadbolt and sinking into the doorway, sinking, sinking, falling, melting, _dying,_ falling into the floor with her cheek pressed to the dirty tiles that smell like piss and ammonia. Eyes are so filled with tears that she can't see; they burn her when they come loose and trail down her face to pool on the dingy floor. She flops like a dying fish, gasping, choking, _help me help me help me please_; pulls head to her chest, her jaw closing around the fabric of her shirt collar so hard her jaw hurts. The fabric scratches her throat, but she bites down harder, and screams screams _screams _into the cotton so it's barely heard at all.

**VI.**

The shiny door of the locker glares at him. In his hand is the combination, on a Post-it already curling with the sweat from his palm.

He looks around, feeling like a thief. There is, of course, no one around. School's been out almost two hours. Ticks the lock off, hears it snap open. The door whines in protest. Smells like stale sweat inside, tugs at his stomach. It reminds him of the locker room. Like dirty gear. The inside of anyone's hockey bag.

_Hockey._ Dimly, the word rattles inside his head. He had practice today, didn't he? Did. Does. Won't. Coach will kill him –

_Kill_ –

then he drops the lock on the ground, startling himself again. Bends down to pick it up and drops it again. Can't hold onto it or something. Kicks it out of the way with the toe of his sneaker, and it spins on the dirty tile floor until it skids underneath the row of lockers across the hallway.

So he misses hockey. The rest of the guys will deal. This is more important than practice, more important than a championship, more important than the fucking Stanley Cup.

Textbooks stare at him, and a backpack hunches in the back, trying not to be seen. Carefully, he stacks the textbooks in the same neat pile inside the box at his feet. Does the same with the binders, not looking at the cover or opening them up.

Backpack. Half-zipped. He doesn't realize this until he grabs it and papers go flying out. Cursing, he bends down to pick them up. Sees the signs in red – _Needs Work, See Me After Class, Tutoring? – _and numbers, the code for where the words aren't necessary.

Failing grades on nearly everything.

He shoves the pages away. Something smells from the bottom of the bag; he lifts out a paper sack with the rock-hard, moldy remains of what looked like a piece of caf pizza wrapped in a napkin. There's more at the bottom – a bag of potato chips, a bag of the cookies the lunch lady makes that are always more dough than anything else. Now they're bits of broken rocks. Also a yellow Gatorade, half-drunk.

He stares at the bag for a long time. Something about it has him mesmerized. He finds he can't do anything but stand there with the long-gone-bad food, just looking at it.

He comes to a – Minute? Two? An hour? – later. Looks back in the locker. The only other thing left is something coiled at the bottom. He pulls it out and runs it between his fingers.

A necktie.

Game Day uniform. Everyone had to wear one, with a collared shirt and khakis. He must have kept this one in here as a spare.

Gently, he runs his finger over the smooth front. Red, like the team color…

Red brick church. Sitting between Luke and Dalton, underneath a stained glass of Mary cradling her son – sheltering him like she won't be able to when the time comes. _The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want_. He stares at the dull eyes of the mother and child, wonders – briefly, insanely, horribly – what happened to His team jacket. He was wearing it when –

Sometimes, he thinks he can really feel the rough fabric of that jacket under his fingers. The texture turning over in his hands. Like he actually managed to grab hold.

_Black blood on the concrete – _

He stares at the bag of moldy food in one hand, the tie in his other. Clenches both in his fists.

The abandoned lunch is really fucking pissing him the fuck off.

He spins on his heels and hurls the entire thing in the trashcan. But the lunch bounces off the rim, so it goes flying backwards, slamming into the locker where the rotted remnants of it trail down the hall; Hansel and Gretel's trail gone cold and lost.

"Fuck!" he shouts at the top of his lungs, and bangs the locker with the flat of his palm. His voice booms, carrying down the entire empty hallway.

"Motherfucker," he adds, for good measure.

"Everything okay there, Mr. Dallas?"

A tall form comes down the hallway, briefcase and coat in hand. Perino, Dallas makes out when the shape gets closer. His tie undone and smelling like stale cigarettes, car keys dangling. He had to have heard that little outburst.

"Nothing, sir."

Perino stands next to him and takes it in. The empty locker. The books waiting to be returned, the dates of their assignments forever suspended. The homework not completed. The lunch leftovers forgotten. The extra neck tie, never to be worn again.

Perino sighs quietly.

"Poor fucking kid," is all he says.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note: SO excited for tonight. I'm nervous as fuck, but still really excited/terrified/OMG to see how the events of BSS (and the rest of 12C) play out.**

**I don't own Degrassi.**

**I.**

The turn signal has Maya mesmerized. She listens to the flicker, waiting for the moment when it matches up with the blinking lights of the Mazda behind them. She always wondered why, after that split second of perfect timing, the turn signals suddenly stop matching, and it takes a few seconds for them to find that perfect rhythm again. Like an orchestra that only plays every other measure right.

In front of her, Jake's windshield wipers barely do the job of wiping away the newly-falling snowflakes. Katie whispers something to him, and Jake laughs. Maya focuses on the steady click of the truck's blinker going off then on, off then on, off then on, the noise once again falling out of beat with the car behind them.

She presses her forehead against the freezing glass of the truck's back windshield. The sky is colorless, so bleached of anything resembling the beautiful spring sunshine they had just a few weeks ago that Maya can barely bring to mind what color it's supposed to be. An expanse of nothing stretches out and over everything, like the whole world is smothered in a mindless fog of sleep.

Katie fiddles with the radio dial, and Jake slaps her hand away playfully. Apparently all that gardening has been good for them, since Maya feels like they haven't stopped laughing for days. Even when Jake isn't at their house, Katie seems to never wipe the irritating smile off her face, or silences the text alert chime on her phone. Once Maya took it out of her purse and turned it off, then put it in the cabinet above the coffee maker. When Katie found out, she banged on Maya's locked bedroom door while Maya buried her head under the covers with her ear buds on, blasting the Lumineers and ignoring her.

She was sure Katie didn't know what she'd heard – if she had, she would have threatened to kill Maya by now, or at least bribed her silence – but Maya doesn't care if her sister knows or not. Katie isn't the only one who can have a secret.

Now, watching Jake and Katie's fingers brush over the gear shift briefly, she finds herself staring at them like a total creeper weirdo freak loser perv. Still, she can't seem to look away, and finds a familiar concrete knob aching in the back of her bricked-up throat. She stares at the way their hands barely come together, how they don't even need to grab each other's palms or link fingers or even really touch at all, and it still looks like they've whispered to each other in the dark under rumpled sheets, made promises to each other filled with wonder and terror and ache and need and _want, I want, I want –_

"_I'll always want you."_

Jake comes to a sudden stop, which causes her to lurch forward and collide into the back of Katie's seat. Her head rings with the impact, and while Jake curses the other driver, Maya puts a hand to her forehead and realizes her palms are clammy, her face too flushed with heat, her limbs vibrating with a force that has nothing to do with the slam on the brakes.

"Everything okay?"

Jake's voice sounds like it's coming from a different shore. Maya barely picks out the words, like she's rowing through the murky waters of just-woke-up confusion.

"What?"

"You okay?" Jake grits his teeth. "Fucking asshole; cut right in front of me. I almost smacked right into him."

"Jake," Katie warns, but she's got a smile peeling the corners of her mouth. Even after an almost-accident, she manages to look so stupid-happy she looks just stupid.

Maya scowls. "Fine," she mumbles.

He glances at her through the rearview. His eyes take up the entire mirror.

"You sure?"

"I said I'm fine," she snaps.

Katie whirls around and glares at her. "Stop being rude," she hisses.

She knows she really _is_ being rude and she always _has_ liked Jake, but now all Maya thinks of when she looks at him is that afternoon under the blankets, that stranglehold of rage coursing through her, and the pound of the hot water as their voices hovered like mist above the noise.

_Stop doing this to me_, Maya wants to shout back, along with maybe socking Jake in the face or something. The way his eyes furrow in the rearview and look at her with all this sweet concern only makes her angrier when she sees how Katie's hand rests on the edge of Jake's seat, inches away from his shoulder.

When they pull into the school parking lot, she rattles the back of Katie's seat. "Can you hurry up and let me out?"

She thinks Katie and Jake exchange the briefest of glances, but Jake gets out of the truck and doubles his own chair over before she can be sure. "Got it," he says.

He offers her a hand to climb out, but she ignores it, jumping to the ground and nearly slipping in the wet snow.

Katie gives her a look over her shoulder as they head towards the school. Maya stares right back.

"Dad's picking you up," Katie calls back as she and Jake walk ahead of her. "So don't wait for me."

_Don't worry. I won't dare ruin anything between you and your precious boyfriend that you love so much._

The savage reply leaves a taste in her mouth like licking rust.

"Got it," Maya says.

Katie doesn't look back to her. As Maya stands in the snowy mud, shifting her backpack on her back and shoving her cold fingers in her pocket, she watches the two of them go into the school together, not holding hands or even shoulder-to-shoulder, and she's filled with that same days-old unimaginable fury she still cannot name or bury.

Someone beeps at her – a Grade 12 trying to pull into his parking spot, which Maya is standing right in front of – and she startles out of the way. Some people snicker; others recognize her, and stare as she hikes through the cold. Maya keeps her head down, focusing on the cracked pavement, head tucked against the wind.

"Maya! Hey, Maya!"

Tori is jogging towards her, Tristan in her wake.

"You got a minute?" Tori says in a stage-whisper.

Maya sighs. "Depends. Are you gonna bug me about another sushi night?"

"No." Tori pauses, wringing her hands for a moment. She peers over her shoulder, then walks towards a quiet corner of the schoolyard where less people are congregated. Tristan and Maya follow her.

"I heard people talking," Tori says, once they're out of earshot.

Maya shrugs one shoulder. Tori just stares at her, her hands wringing so hard Maya's surprised they don't just twist off.

"And?" She raises an eyebrow. "I'm not a mind reader, Tor."

Tori opens her mouth, then shuts it again. She looks over at Tris, who just shrugs.

Maya rolls her eyes. "Could one of you, please, just spit it out already?"

Tori clears her throat, shuffles her feet.

"We heard rumors," she says. "Simpson asked Mike Dallas to clean out – to clean out Cam's locker. Some girls on the lacrosse team saw him do it after school yesterday."

Maya hoists her backpack higher on her shoulder, the strap digging into her neck.

"So why are you telling me?" she asks.

Tris and Tori exchange a tight glance.

"I don't…" She keeps looking at Tristan, as if trying to give him his stage cues. Maya makes it a point to stare him down, even though he's doing everything he can to hide his face under the brim of his fedora and stare at the dirty slush at his feet."We were just trying to stop you from finding out any other way. We wanted to make sure we got to you first."

The strap digs harder into her neck; she shifts, and the weight falls onto her shoulder blades. "What did you think I would do?" she says slowly.

Tori shrugs, helpless. "I don't know, Maya."

Maya shakes her head. Her hair spills out of her snow cap, and her fingers crack as she grips the straps of her backpack, squeezing them until her knuckles ache.

"Well," she snaps, "I'll tell you. Nothing. I'm not gonna do anything, because I don't _care_ about a stupid locker."

"Okay," Tori says. But she doesn't sound convinced.

Maya rolls her eyes. "I'm serious. I don't _care_ if Mike Dallas cleaned out Cam's locker." Her voice doesn't hitch on the name, doesn't. "I don't give a shit what anybody does about it. And I don't need you two to baby me about everything."

She turns away, then whirls back, glaring at them. "Everyone either ignores me or treats me like I'm crazy. I'm not gonna slit my wrists over a stupid locker!"

She watches the both of them recoil at the words. It spreads a warmth inside her as she turns away and heads toward the double doors.

"We're just trying to help!"

Tristan's yell stops her in her tracks. Tori's crying and pretending not to, but Tristan's face is clouded over, and he's got his hands crossed over his chest, his mouth in a flat line.

Her jaw clenches, nearly cracking at the force. "Then stop trying!"

She hurries through the doors just as the bell rings; its warning clangs and startles her already rushing heart, and she takes a minute to breathe by her locker. Her French book falls twice from her shaking hands, and she drops it both times she tries to pick it up.

The late bell sounds. She leaves it on the ground, and ends up in the theater supply room, surrounded by bits and pieces of castles, mansions, roadside flower stands, carnivals, and haunted houses. Old play sets. She sees a piece she remembers from the _Romeo & Jules_ set earlier this year. Stares at the colors faded, the paint chipping, the layers of dust.

_"I'm sad, and I just want it to go away."_

"It'll get better," Tori whispered in her ear once, and she thought, "what the fuck?"

**II.**

He'd been walking to the end of a dock surrounded by dead winter trees. They burst from the frozen black ground like skeletal limbs, reaching right up from the grave.

"Don't look that out."

Cam was sitting next to him. He was fully clothed and had his Ice Hounds windbreaker on, but his hair had been, Dallas noticed, completely soaking wet, like he'd just dunked only his head in a bathtub. His hair was plastered to his face, dripping down his cheeks before vanishing, never getting droplets on his clothes or below his neck.

He was close enough to reach for, close enough to touch.

Cam had his chin rested on his knees, looking out over the docks. The lake underneath them was frozen over, the sunlight playing off the ice, glittering so brightly Dallas couldn't stand to look at it.

He looked at Cam instead.

Cam didn't notice, or just didn't acknowledge, Dallas watching him. Instead he just sat on the uneven planks of the lonely dock, knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped around them, still and silent. His soaking wet head stayed focused on the solid lake for what felt like hours, like he was focused on something Dallas couldn't see but didn't try to look for. He just sat, watching Cam watch the glowing, glimmering soar of the sun against the mirror of the water.

"Not here," Cam says suddenly.

He's still facing the lake. The hard silver water glints at them, the sun burning off of it hard as an accusation. He was close enough to reach out to, but Dallas still couldn't move.

_Close enough to reach –_

And when Dallas jolted awake right after, his head spinning like a deranged merry-go-round and his chest crushed with iron and fire and _The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want_ in a red brick church, "why?" was on his lips, big as a heartbreak.

He blinks. Kicks snow with the toe if his shoes. Stares at the dark silver ocean of the sky overhead, the beat of the sun against the clouds burning his eyes. When he slams them shut, he can almost put the image of Cam's face out of his mind.

_Close enough to reach –_

Crunch of snow and gravel under tires. Vanessa has the same car he remembers. Except for the kid seat in the back he can see through her windshield.

From his spot by a picnic table covered in a sheet of ice, he watches her pick up a bundle of Jayden wrapped in a huge blue parka, carrying him gingerly across the slippery tundra of asphalt.

"Why the hell is it snowing," she snaps, when he's in earshot.

He shrugs. "Welcome to Canada."

She glares at him.

"It's _April_," she says, like that makes a difference.

He knows she's already pissed he couldn't meet her yesterday. Besides, Vanessa never dealt with the cold. Born and bred Canadian, and she handles the snow like people handle cars that break down on the side of the highway, or computers that crash the night before a term paper's due. The first party he went to with her, she wore cut-offs, even though it was November and raining and the trees had already lost their will to preen their fiery autumn colors, were already pulling into themselves and bracing for the dead emptiness of winter.

"Daddy!"

The memory breaks like a dream. Jayden is reaching. Vanessa is watching. No cut-offs, but still a cold and colorless sky hangs above them. The wind is still like a blade. The bare trees are _scratchscrattlescritching_ like an old song – snow in April and November in the rain.

She puts Jayden down, and he stumbles through the snow, falling into Dallas's knees. He looks up, grinning, still reaching for him, fingers grasping in the freezing nothing.

Dallas slowly reaches a hand down, palm flat. He could touch the top of Jayden's unruly curls with his hand if he wanted to. He skims it barely above the snarled mop, hovering above the boy's head, just shy of making actual contact.

He coughs. The movement feels like swallowing knives. Pulls his hand back up. Jayden is still at his feet, but he's more interested in the dusting the snow off his boots, for now.

"So," he says. "Where do you wanna do this?"

Vanessa frowns. Her face looks lined and tired, but he can tell she saw him stop short of actually touching Jay. "I was gonna let him run around for a minute."

"I thought you wanted to _talk_," he says, weighing the whole sentence on that last word.

She scowls. "I do. In a few minutes. He's been cooped up inside for two days; he needs to blow off some steam or he'll be up all night again."

"Then couldn't you have done that without me?"

Vanessa raises one eyebrow, arms crossed over her chest.

"Leave or don't leave," she says coolly. "I'm here for our son."

She _would_ throw that in his face.

_Says you_, he wants to say, but chooses this battle wisely.

Vanessa turns away from him, walking a few paces behind Jayden, who is trying to run in the snow and keeps falling flat on his face. Each time he does, he just pops up a second later, running at full speed even though he should know by now that's not going to work. But it happens, without fail – he runs, he falls, he gets up. He runs some more, laughter shrill across the silent park and his arms out in front of him like Frankenstein, then down he goes, face-first. Never cries, never pauses. Just gets right back up again and takes off. _Relentless_, vocab word.

It makes Dallas smile, before he knows what he's doing.

After a few paces, he's even with Vanessa. She doesn't look at him, just fiddles with her gloves.

"It's nice here," Vanessa says, after a long silence. "Nicer than I thought."

Dallas shrugs. He keeps his eye on Jayden, on his knees in the unmelted drifts. He's trying to pack a snowball into his hand, but the snow isn't hard enough, and they keep falling apart in his little palms.

He looks up at them, bits of the snow glittering as they melt in his outstretched glove.

"No man!" he insists. "No man!"

"I don't think the snow's hard enough for that," Dallas says, but Vanessa shoots him a Look. Already she's on her knees next to Jayden, trying to pack a base together.

"You can at least try," she hisses through her teeth, while Jayden dumps an armful of snow onto the pile.

Dallas takes a step back. When did he become the villain in all of this?

As predicted, the snow is too wet to pack. Instead of standing upright, their little man crumbles, falling back to the earth almost as quickly as they can put him back together. Instead of trying, Vanessa just tackles Jayden into the mound of dirty snow, tickling him as he writhes and giggles on top of the wreckage of their creation.

Now Dallas full-on grinning, and he knows it. Lets it. His face feels stretched and unnatural, like it hadn't made that face in so long, but it felt so good that he just kept doing it.

Vanessa always _was_ good at making a good time out of nothing. He never met anyone better at stirring things up and getting things going than he was, until he met her. She gave him the only run for his money he'd ever had.

Jayden catches his smile from over Vanessa's shoulder. He reaches towards him again, arms outstretched.

"Up!" he commands.

Dallas hesitates long enough for Vanessa to stare daggers into him.

Jayden throws his arms up again.

"Up!" he commands. "Daddy, up!"

Dallas squats, even with the boy's face. Wide little smile, cheeks glowing. Eyes brown and warm, wide with trust, reaching toward him, for him, and for a moment Dallas wants him so badly to be somebody else.

He leans closer in, enough to feel the warm puffs from Jayden's breath. "Up?" he asks quietly.

Jayden nods so vigorously that clumps of snow fall from his hair. "Up!" he confirms.

Dallas hesitates a moment, then reaches his arms out. "Up," Dallas repeats, and pulls Jayden to him.

Again, he's a sturdy weight in Dallas's hold. That same feeling he had in the restaurant comes back to him; he likes the feel of Jayden, the heaviness and movement; the finely packed reality. Steady, warm, here. Squirming and giggling, here. The aliveness.

On impulse, he swings the little boy high above his head, holding him up under his armpits.

"Arms out," he calls to him. "Superman!"

Jayden throws his arms out and screams at the sky.

He laughs as he's spun around, slow at first, then picking up speed, and Dallas finds himself joining in. As they spin, he sees Vanessa out of the corner of his eyes. She isn't smiling, but he can't see her well enough to read the expression on her face.

"Spin!" Jayden demands, whenever Dallas starts to slow. "Spin!" So he keeps going, even though his arms ache for rest and he's starting to get dizzy. Finally he stops, putting the boy down before falling back into the snow, angeling with his arms and legs as he stares up at the sky. With the world turned white around them, the light is too bright, and what little color there is seems to burn with violent radiance – the knives of sunlight a supercharged yellow, the clouds molten silver, the sky a blue too perfect to put any other words to…

He has to close his eyes against it, that perfect, silken blue.

He opens them again when a cold chunk of snow is dumped on his face. Coughing, he turns to the side, spitting out the bits caught on his chapped lips. Vanessa is laughing under her breath, and Jayden is busy gathering another hunk of snow in his hands.

"Get him again," he hears Vanessa whisper to Jayden.

He hauls himself to his feet, already grabbing snow. "No, you don't!"

Vanessa shrieks and tries to run, but he grabs the hood of her snow jacket, and while she yells and giggles he dumps a hunk of snow down her back.

He watches her yelp and dance away from the cold's grasp. She bends over and shakes the snow loose, and he can hear her laughter rippling over the silver afternoon, like it's the only sound in the world.

He reaches a hand out and brushes some snow off the back of her coat. "Got you good," he says, his lips teasing upward into a smile.

She tries to frown, but it's fighting with a grin. "Shut up. We got you better."

Jayden is running ahead in the snow. His wild hair is an angry scribble against the colorless woods.

"He doesn't look a lot like you," Dallas says, out of nowhere.

Vanessa raises an eyebrow. "Thanks."

He shrugs. "Just saying."

"They say that babies look like their fathers when they're born," Vanessa says. She looks over at him. "Nature's way of saying who the daddy is."

He looks away, shaking his head.

Vanessa blows into her hands. "I'm glad he's running around. He was driving me nuts inside. Except he hasn't been napping, so he'll probably be really cranky later."

"At least he'll be tired," Dallas says, and before he can question the insanity of it, replies, "should go right to sleep."

And are they really having this conversation?

"I should have brought his bathing suit," Vanessa says. "We could have gone swimming in the hotel pool. He loves swimming. Whenever I take him to the pool in the summer, I can't get him out of the water."

There's a quick swoop in the pit of his stomach at that. _He loves swimming._ The locked, concrete haven with Alli come to mind, the neon waters and the night that smelled like asphalt and onion grass, chlorine and honeysuckle.

There's a hand grabbing his.

Dallas looks down at Jayden, who is grabbing his hand and swinging it back and forth, back and forth.

He kneels back down to the boy's level, stopping just short of pulling his hand away. "You wanna spin again?"

Jayden shakes his head. "Awater!" he says, or at least that's what Dallas assumes he says.

Dallas looks over at Vanessa, wringing the snow out of her damp braid. Her eyes are locked on Jayden's in his; he wonders if she saw him flinch, the urge to pull away. "What does he want?"

"He wants you to toss him," she says. "You know, throw him in the air, catch him."

Dallas's eyes widen. "Seriously?"

"My brother does it with him all the time," she says. "He calls it 'elevator'. Throws Jay up, catches him, tosses him back up again. He loves it, don't worry. He won't get scared."

Jayden lays his palm on Dallas's cheek. It's so sudden that Dallas just stops for a second, forgets what he's doing or saying or anything, momentarily stupefied.

Jayden chirps again, right in his ear. His voice is husky and demanding.

Dallas stays kneeling in the snow for a moment, frozen. For a moment, Jayden just looks at him, the small face almost worried, then confused, then annoyed.

Vanessa comes up to them. "What's the problem?" she says. Her voice is light and she's smiling, but her eyes look pissed off. Again. The park is suddenly quiet again; her laughter singing across it just moments ago is swallowed up by endless white hush around them.

Dallas hands her the boy as if he's being burned. "You do it."

Her eyes widen. "Seriously?"

"You do it," Dallas repeats. "He'll like it better if you do."

"I can't," she argues. "He's too heavy for me."

"Just…" he turns away. "You do it with him."

Just like that, the laughter completely falls away from her face. Vanessa frowns, her eyes as angry as ever.

"Are you for real?"

"What?"

"What, you suddenly have somewhere to be?"

"No!" He looks at Jayden, then back at her.

How could he explain to her?

He can't, any more than she would get it. _He_ doesn't even get it.

She glares at him. "If you don't want to be here, don't be here. It's what you've always done, anyway."

He pauses, thinking of all the words he could say to that. While they simmer and burn the edges of his lips, rattling on the insides of his mouth, he keeps walking, focusing on the crunch of the snow under his boots, the reflection of the light as it curves across the glittering fields.

When he's far enough away, he turns and glances back at the two of them. Vanessa has her back to him, and she's tossing Jayden up in the air. She was right – she can't toss him – but he goes high enough to make his laughter ripple like an echo across the frozen park.

Dallas can't help watching them. Watching as she catches him each and every time he falls, certain as sunrise. Watches Jayden high in the open sky, shrieking as the ground gets closer. Watches the security of arms around him, the promise that he'll always he caught on time.

**III.**

The house is dark and silent when her dad finally brings her home. It's early in the afternoon, but she feels like the early darkness has seeped into her skin, her bones, running through her blood, and she's exhausted. She sits at the kitchen table, cheek on the cool glass, and thinks about making herself some hot cocoa to spark life back into her frozen body but stays where she is.

She's been sitting in the library for hours, tucked in the never-populated back row by the computer manuals. For a while, she tried to study for the big French test she and Tristan have next week. Out of all the damages to her marks, French has suffered the worst. In the past few weeks, she's in danger of dropping almost two full letter grades. Miss Garnet has offered her extra help after school and even an extension on the paper they had due last week, but after she didn't turn in the essay at all it looks like getting a good mark on this test is the only thing that can save her from missing out on her French credit this year.

Of course, that's if she shows up to class on the day of the test.

She started poking at conjugations for a while, writing them down in neat columns on a fresh piece of loose-leaf, but she'd find herself staring off into space, losing who knows how many minutes. Eventually she just put her head down on the table and closed her eyes, resting her hands in her arms.

Just to make sure there's no one else home, Maya closes her eyes and cocks an ear towards the hall that leads to the bathroom she and Katie share, as well as their bedrooms. She doesn't hear any voices, televised or other, and after a few moments of sitting in the sound of her own labored breathing, she decides that she is safely home alone.

So apparently "working in the garden" really did mean "working in the garden". Every time Maya listens to them talk about seed packets and fertilizer brands and garden tools, she rolls her eyes and wonders if the two of them are really this enthusiastically Green Peace, or they just never run out of euphemisms.

The thought makes her itchy, and she shivers. Doesn't like the taste the thought leaves behind. Hot cocoa would make that better.

The white noise whoosh of the faucet, and she stares as the force of it splashes water every which way out of the sink. She takes a finger, runs it under the steaming blast of heat, her skin instantly shrieking and wanting her to pull away.

Instead of recoiling from the pain, she leaves it under the water, letting it burn so hot it feels cold. Eventually, the knifelike pain stops shooting through her, and her skin numbs to the hurt, so that even though the water doesn't get any cooler she stops feeling it altogether.

So this is what it's like, she thinks, to stop feeling anything. To feel pain without having a getaway; to ache without having the recoil to avoid it. To eventually absorb bursts of agonizing hurt until it turns to numb nothingness, like white noise.

Steam fogs her glasses while she holds her arm under the faucet.

She had woken up from a midday nap last week to the sound of a shower blasting on full-spray. There were voices, ones from – the TV? – and she slid out of bed, still half-asleep and grey-eyed, shuffling across the floor to the hall bathroom she shared with Katie, where she heard the water running.

She was about to head to the kitchen when she realized something – the voice she was hearing wasn't from the TV, but came from inside the bathroom. One was Katie's, and there was another one, wrapped around her sister's and threaded through the steam and the nonstop downpour of the water.

Her hand froze on the doorknob to the bathroom before she even knew it was sitting there. What was she going to do? Burst in and bust the two of them? Blackmail Katie for having a boy in the house when her parents weren't home?

It wasn't just in the _house_. There was a dumb daze that had settled over her, and her sleep-fogged mind tried to pick through it, like a drunk taking footsteps. Katie was in the shower with a boy, a naked shower with a naked boy and they were in the shower naked and they were laughing and naked together showering and nobody was home except for her and them, though she was positive they didn't know she was home because if they did Katie never would have risked getting in the shower – naked with a boy – if there was the slightest chance of being caught.

She recognized the other voice in there with Katie. Still, it took some more confused raking over the idea in her mind before she put together that Jake and her sister were in the shower together and that meant they were naked together and seeing everything and it probably meant they'd already done everything else if they didn't care about being naked in front of each other and what. What.

Their post-Vegas war had apparently ended and now they were in the shower together and probably did other stuff before or after the shower. Or while they were_ in_ the shower, and that made Maya recoil from the doorknob so fast she almost tripped over herself.

She staggered back to her bed, the door clicking shut behind her – not slamming, the last thing she wanted was the unbearable awkwardness if Jake and Katie heard her and realized they weren't alone – and buried her head under the covers. Her head was flip-flopping in mud, slow and uneven; it was pounding so hard she felt her entire body thud with the force. She pulled one blanket over her waist, the other over her head like a shawl, and put one more underneath her head. Her feet were sticking out; she pulled them into her chest, tucking them under the duvet. For some reason she felt like crying, but not because she was sad. She felt, for some reason, burning, blazing, tear-the-walls-down, breathe-fire anger. As strong as hatred, for how hard it pitted in her stomach and roiled through her blood, itching underneath her skin and making her want to peel it off, layer by layer by layer, until she could fold herself into smaller and smaller pieces.

She had pressed her face into the blanket and tried not to cry, if only because she was sure it would feel like she might combust if she gave into it. Instead she kept her body still under the mound of blankets, listening for the sound of the bathroom door clicking, and waited through wave after wave of white-hot anger, so unreal in its strength, as it beat through her like an acidic pulse and flushed her skin with its brutal honesty.

The water is still running. Again she blinks, feeling as if she's just woken up. The hazy memories of reality cling to her like walking through a spider's web. No idea how much time has passed. If she keeps this up, she could lose hours, days even, just by staring off into nothing.

Although, she thinks, maybe it wouldn't be too much of a bad thing to keep losing time – lately there seems to be too much of it, and except for what she loses in moments like this when her world tunnels and becomes murky as mud, she feels like the hours are sticking together, passing in a maddening snail's pace that infuriates her and makes her want to grab them loose, rattle them free, give these minutes, hours, days and weeks away to people who actually _need_ more time. Because that's the last thing she needs - too many opportunities to slip away, getting sucked out of everything real by the black hole force in the dangerous galaxy of her own memories.

Someone else can have all the time in the world. Her world. Every day seems to get longer and heavier to shoulder than the last, and each day already feels like forever. And she's really not sure how many "forevers" she can take.

The steam has fogged her glasses, also fogged up the window above the sink, she can no longer see through the glass. Can no longer see the cherry blossom tree that lies between their house and their neighbor's, the one that just flowered. Her dad always hated that the blossom bits get all over his car, but Maya loved it. It was like the entire block exploded with little brides in lace veils who couldn't help showing off their dazzling happiness, their snapshot-second of perfection before the veil was lifted.

She remembers, suddenly, right After –. People would steal flowers from the garden and leave them around the school. At His old desks, in front of His locker, in the broken display case student council made as a memorial (more like a shrine to the Ice Hounds, He would have _hated_ it) that Mike Dallas was rumored to have broken. People left flowers outside, too – for some reason, they had created a makeshift memorial against the chain-link fence the police built around the side of the school where He –. There were dozens of cards, flowers, hockey sticks, Ice Hounds pennants, even teddy bears. It was so stupid and idiotic and sentimental sappy stupid stupid_ stupid –_

The same people who left those probably left the bouquet of white roses by the chain-link, the day before the snow fell. It made her want to strangle someone, seeing those flowers. Like all the stupid people crying in the hallways, hugging each other and sobbing "why, why, why". People who didn't even _know_ Him, and here they were all acting like they suddenly lost their best friend, idiots, they had no idea, no _fucking _idea. Maya rolled her eyes so hard they almost came out of her head when someone in one of her classes mentioned that they should donate all the money made from Ice Hounds ticket sales to a suicide prevention program. As if _that_ wouldn't be the most perfect definition of irony ever for Dawes's class.

It pissed her the hell off, seeing those roses; seeing _all_ the flowers. She wanted to go over and tear the bouquet to pieces; rip the petals off them; kick the colors away until they were nothing but a pile of greens and dirt ground into the concrete that still had bloodstains on it.

Her entire body shudders furiously over the sink, an electrifying rattle that slams her belly into the granite countertop and snaps her head back so fast her neck spasms. Her entire body goes cold and boneless; she leans against the sink, gripping the sink knobs as the water rushes and steams and soaks the sleeves of her shirt.

Fuck the flowers, those stupid flowers.

Her head feels too heavy to hold upright; she limps away from the sink, doubled over like she's warding off a blow. Her glasses fogged with steam and her heart beating limply in her ears, she stumbles away from the kitchen. The skin that she held under the water for so long feels raw and peeled, like someone skimmed it off and then stapled it on backwards.

Maya throws herself facedown on the couch in front of the television. The cushion fabric is stiff and smells like dust and there isn't any sunlight, so night comes faster and harder than she's prepared for. The darkness circles her all around, pressing her between its pages, losing her in its folds, and it's freezing. She can't get warm here like she does in her bed, and there aren't any stars on the ceiling, or sheets to hold her like arms.

It would make sense that Simpson didn't ask her to clean out the locker. She and…they were broken up. The whole school knew it, and besides that, the whole _school_ saw what happened at the pep rally. The fight, the black eye, her trying to pull Him off of Zig, the two of them being dragged off to Simpson's office by Armstrong.

Simpson didn't ask her because he knew it was _her_ fault.

She was His girlfriend, and she broke Him. And after she ruined everything, He went up to the roof and threw Himself three stories down, smashing like dreams against the concrete.

Of course Simpson blamed her; he was_ right_ to. He knew, like everyone else did, that she was the one who did this. She made Him do it.

All her fault, all her fault.

Her fault, her fault her fault her fault her fault her fault her –

She thinks she knows why the stars all disappear when the lights come on. They feel safer in the dark, when nothing looks solid, like the whole world's just made of thought and shadow and you're safe, safe under a skyline of whole other worlds that shrink your own, so that everything feels somehow not real. When it's dark, the sky is filled with false promises, an entire glowing world that looks alive and beautiful and promising but is actually pretty much dead already.

**IV.**

And then when he wakes up again in the middle of the night, he's on the floor of the Torres's spare bedroom, a scream choking him, and he can't tell if the ceiling is really spinning as fast as he sees, or if it's just his own head going crazy.

He lies there until the shadows stop melting. Then crawls to his knees, head pressed into the carpet as his hands scrabble to hold on, to will the ground from shaking. His stomach does a barrel role, but he holds it in. What is there to come up, anyway?

A bird sings through the midnight, and it makes him want to cry. Except he doesn't, presses his face harder into the carpet, eyes squeezed shut. Galaxies explode behind them, colors soaring and swirling and fading. As they glow and recede in the darkness, the words echo in his ears –

_no man, no man, no man. _


	5. Chapter 5

**Author's Note: I was going to have this posted before Part II aired, but now I'm glad I waited. I had to take a few days off from writing after Friday because I was just so drained, and writing this was a bit of an overload. **

**Since I had this story outlined before the episodes aired, here's where this fic breaks away from canon. I was a little hesitant about putting this out SO soon after BSS because it's still so fresh in everyone's minds, but just keep in mind that this story predates canon, so some key facts we know about the events of those episodes are different, and the timeline has also been altered. For instance, in this story, Maya broke up with Cam before he died, and Dallas was the one who not only the one who saw the body, but also watched the whole thing happen. Both of these facts are tremendously important to the way the events of this fic play out, so just keep them in mind.**

**Be warned, there are some details in this chapter that are bit graphic in places. I tried not to let it get out of hand, but in some parts, I kind of disturbed myself writing it. Just warning.**

**Thanks to Jay-Ell-Gee and musiksnob, both excellent supporters (as well as terrific writers, but you already know that) who really helped me out when I hit a bump in the road. **

**Also, random little fun(ish?) fact: All of the time sequences in this chapter are multiples of 67, Cam's jersey number. Silly, probably, but for a story that's so heavy, I needed to put something in there that wasn't so weighted down with sadness, especially since watching Friday's episode was so emotionally exhausting.**

**I don't own Degrassi.**

**I.**

_11:39 PM – Friday April 28_

"You don't get out much, do you?"

Skye laughs, but he takes her hand and helps guide her through the hallway. She must be really terrible at walking today, because she keeps slamming into the walls. Her legs don't feel like they're attached her body; Maya looks down and sees that they still are, and it makes her laugh. Haha, she has ghost legs.

"Hey." Skye's voice sounds too loud, like he's got a megaphone to her ear. Or, she thinks, maybe she's got super drunk powers and can hear for miles. Like a superpower. Except she has to be drunk to use it. Maya squeezes her eyes shut, trying to focus on a single noise in the downstairs thud of the bass, one voice in the tangled yarn of dozens of faces she's never seen before. Nothing is clear, except for his voice, which is clear enough to hear for miles, she thinks.

"I feel…"

A back door. A room with a wooden floor – seriously? Whose bright idea was this? Someone could get hurt. She stumbles at that thought, and has to put her hand on the arm of a recliner to keep from falling on the dark red wood.

"Whoa," Skye laughs. "Steady there. You got it?"

She grabs onto his arm. He slides an arm around her waist, his fingers brushing up to the bare skin under her shirt hem. They're warm and calloused on her cold skin.

Skye guides her to another door, and when he unlocks it, they're standing in a slushy yard, and she grips the edge of a picnic table to remain standing.

She tilts her head towards the sky. It smells cold and remote, isolated from everything else. It's like being encased in ice.

"Great," she murmurs. Skye's fingers tighten around her body, and his hands slide further up her shirt, trailing up her bare spine. It tingles, but she barely feels it. She realizes, with a detached, clinical observation, that she can barely feel anything at all.

**II.**

_11:39 PM – Friday April 28_

The windowsill is freezing, but after his third or fourth beer he stopped feeling it. Stopped feeling anything, which he realizes is pretty much the best feeling ever.

Better than winning a stupid hockey game, definitely. He tips the can back, gulps the rest. Feels the sting as it goes down. He can leave that up to the rest of the guys tomorrow night.

The more he stares at the skyline, the more it changes, waves, shimmers and stretches. It's like the whole world's some mirage, and he's wandering through a desert, dying of thirst. Well, he thinks, tipping his – sixth? seventh? – can back, that's a silly idea. Nobody dying of thirst here. Nope. _Juuust _thirsty enough.

The highway roars to life, even this late at night. Funny, how the street always echoes louder after a rainstorm. The ice has finally started to melt as the freak snow gives way to warm spring downpours. Dallas can smell the gutter from where he sits, even this high up; smell how it reeks like worms and mildew, like a billion dead things swept into the rain-soaked darkness. It's suffocating.

He tips the can back, then groans when nothing trickles out. Crumples the aluminum in his hands. Stupid, useless. Everything is. Throws it into the blank walls of the hotel room, reaches for another. Ahhh, the warm, salty fizz of cheap beer. It blooms in his gut like a fist, opening and closing, socking him hard.

Across the highway, someone lays on a horn. It blasts through the shaking night, making his head throb dully.

As he takes another long sip, his other hand tilts the snow globe over on its side. He peers through the glass at the little man sitting inside, surrounded by glittering puffs of fake snow. The snowman seems to be winking at Dallas as he hangs on axis, while the white bits gather on the side of the glass dome. Dallas gives the entire thing a shake, watching a storm swallow the lonely little man whole before hushing silent as a grave.

He shakes the snowglobe again. The little world inside rattles. Gulping the rest of the can in one swig, he throws the decoration against the blank hotel wall, shattering the glass and spilling the water and bits of fake snow onto the scratchy, colorless carpet. As he watches the stain set in, he looks at the snowman, still attached to the cracked wooden base, still smiling upside-down at him, like something about all that brokenness was too funny.

"_No man! No man!"_

Dallas wishes he knew what was so fucking hilarious. Maybe it really _is_ too many beers, but he just can't seem to figure out what the hell is so worth laughing about.

**III.**

_Ten Hours Earlier_

_1:34 PM – Friday April 28_

"Attention Degrassians, don't forget to cheer on your Toronto Ice Hounds tomorrow night against the Westview Wildcats as they fight for the national playoffs. Go Hounds!"

The intercom clicks off, leaving nothing but the silence in the freezing, cramped space. Well, that and the hum of the lights above her. Maya peers at the ceiling, at the overbright lights in the dirty room. There is something horrifying about the way the bathroom fluorescent rattle above her in this dingy little stall. Like the rustle of trapped, beating wings.

When she finally opens her eyes, she wishes she hadn't. It's times like this that Maya wishes she hadn't ignored Tori's requests for makeover advice. Her face is still puffy from last night, eyes all tear-swollen and shot through with red, framed by the same black bags that get heavier and heavier with each sleepless night. Her cheeks are pale and bloated, her lips horribly chapped from the cold. Her entire face looks like someone inflated it with air. She thinks about texting Tori to see if there's any mascara that can work some magic, but there's only ten minutes until class starts, and besides, she thinks she's a little beyond saving at this point.

Her phone's probably dead, anyway. She can't remember the last time she charged it, or even used it.

She leans over the bowl of the sink. Stares at her hands. Did they always have the lines criss-cross like that. She can't remember. She doesn't know how anything is. Means. Does.

For a while, it seemed like her phone never stopped ringing. Ever since the story hit the news, everyone she knew had been calling and texting, asking some girl named Maya if she's okay. It really baffled her, the way they seemed to know who this person was at the other end of the line when she had no clue. Maya. Maya. Who was Maya.

A lot of them sobbed at her in text message, all caps and exclamation points. Others left long-winded voicemails, asking Maya to call them back as soon as possible. Right. She deleted the messages without remembering who sent them, a lot of time without bothering to listen. After a while, she turned her phone off altogether, and can't remember turning it on or using it after that.

Back when she still kept it on, each time the phone rang, she thought, _it might be Him_, and then it wasn't.

Why isn't He calling, she thought, every time it wasn't. It made her angrier, the more she thought about it.

_Isn't He going to call, to see if I'm okay? Isn't He going to help me through this?_

It pissed her off SO much, every single time.

The bathroom crackles around her. It's too cold, and there's the smell of cigarette smoke in the air. She grips the edges of the dingy mirror, and startles horribly as the automatic faucet chokes on water.

A white face, bloated almost beyond recognition, stares back at her when she looks up. The chapped lips are mouthing something in silence. She stares at those scarred lips, but can't figure out what the face is trying to tell her.

**IV.**

_2:01 PM –Friday April 28 _

"You missed practice the other day," Cody says, when Dallas steps into the weight room.

The rest of the guys go quiet. They focus on spots on the wall or suddenly become fixated on tying their shoes, clearing their throats, checking their phones, scanning the weight room for anyone, anything, anybody else.

Dallas shrugs. "Had something important to do." He starts fiddling with the dials on the bench press, even though it's pretty much set to his weight.

Cody's mouth quirks. "We all had something important to do. We all made it to practice. Just not you."

No one moves, talks, breathes. Dallas feels a flush creep up the back of his neck, ugly and hot.

"You wanna grill me about missing a workout?" He looks around at the rest of the guys – every one of them drops their heads when he tries to look them in the eyes. Like they always do, every day. "Fine. Fair enough. Whatever you wanna dish out, give it to me. Not like I wouldn't do the same to you."

"_Hope you like pain, Rookie."_

For a second, Matt looks up at him like he wants to say something, but then fixes the Velcro fastening on his gloves.

Dallas stares at him until Matt finally looks up.

"You got something you wanna say?" Dallas says evenly.

Matt jerks one shoulder like he's flicking off a pesky fly.

"It's not about busting your ass with a hard workout, man," he mumbles. "Coach is talking about moving you off starting line-up."

Dallas shrugs . "If Coach wants to do it, that's his choice."

Matt looks almost angry for some reason. "You should be starting, man, you're the captain! You're the one who needs to be in the game!"

Dallas arches his eyebrow at Matt. "You got a problem with the way I do things?"

"Do what?" Cody argues. "You don't do anything at all!"

Everyone turns to look at him. The room feels so thick that Dallas feels like he needs to look around, to make sure the walls haven't started creeping in, sealing them off in this little room like a tomb.

Cody bites his lip, but frowns at Dallas. "Your head isn't in it," he says. "Like, at all."

Anger bubbles in his stomach. "My head's plenty in it," he snaps.

"That why you're suddenly skipping practice?" Luke asks.

Dallas throws him a glare. Luke suddenly looks like he regrets the words, and glances down at his hands in his lap.

Dallas scans the weight room. Every pair of eyes wants to fix on him, but they stare at the ground instead. Only Cody meets his gaze, and his eyes are blazing, frustrated, angry.

Dallas knows that look.

"_Get your head on, man."_

"_Stop being so selfish!"_

"So you guys think I'll cost us the game?" The tips of his ears are burning, and there's a whoosh sound that rushes in and out, like the pound of the ocean in a seashell. He can barely hear himself speak, think, breathe, over that unbelievable roar.

"It's not just the game, "Cody says. "You've been weird for a while now. And we're not the only ones who noticed."

"Cody," Owen breaks in, his voice low.

Dallas looks over at him. "No," he says, his voice hitching slightly. "No, come on. Tell me. Who else thinks he's right? Who else thinks I'm a shitty captain all of a sudden?"

Owen shakes head and looks away. "Man, come on…"

"What!" He must have shouted that one extra loudly, because he can hear it clear as a bell, even over the beat of his heart in his ears.

Owen rolls his eyes. "It's not about hockey! Man, we all know something's not right. You don't have your shit together, and it shows."

He glares at Owen. "When did you become a shrink?"

"_Get your head on, man."_

God, had he really sounded this awful?

No wonder Cam jumped off a fucking roof.

Dallas puts a hand on his mouth, rubs his chin. His stomach hurts, _hurts_, really fucking hurts. He throws his sweat towel on the bench and storms out of the room, leaving the rest of the team behind to stare at the floor and imagine him covered in blood, imagining a broken heap of bones on the hard, unforgiving ground.

**V.**

_3:35 PM – Friday April 28_

The whole school is talking about the party that night, something promising to be massively out-of-control. Plenty of booze and bad news. It must be a big deal, if even the freshman are hearing about it – normally they only hear about these kids of parties after they happen, when they hear about the drunken exploits of who hooked up with who's boyfriend and who got naked and streaked across the backyard.

When she hears Zig's friend Damon talking about it with some other detention burnouts in their math class, she tunes them out and pretends to doodle random symbols in the margins of her textbook. She's so into it that she almost jumps out of her chair when Armstrong hands their tests back, and he stops at Maya's to hand her paper back, with a failing mark at the top circled in red.

Oh well. So she's failing math, now. What else is news.

She's officially failing French, too. And what's more, she's causing Tristan's mark to go down as well, since he's her new partner. Already she's failed to turn in her half of two assignments they had to do this week, and if Tristan had any patience with her to begin with, it's officially gone at this point. Even Madame's extensions can't be indefinite, even if they have been going on for weeks past the due dates.

Madame cried when she told Maya how sorry she was. She cried at the funeral, too. Maya had seen her, one of the last people to leave the chapel. She watched her teacher kneel down in front of the alter, hands pressed together, and whisper something before making the sign of the cross over herself. It was weird, seeing a teacher cry. It was like seeing a house on fire, or an accident on the side of the road.

She got up on unsteady feet, nearly tripping down the steps, and as she left the church Maya had wondered if Madame thought Cam was in Hell.

"Library, after school." Tristan talks over the buzz of last-bell stampede, as everyone rushes to the frozen parking lot. "We need to ace this project."

"Fine," Maya says. She stops by the window to the garden, looking at some of the flowers Jake and Katie planted there. It makes her think of that cloudless April morning, when she and Tris and Tori were walking past the garden, idly viewing the freshness of Jake's flowers. The whole place was pretty as a painting, little bursts of sunlight growing underneath a perfect blue morning. How crystal-clear and cloudless it was, how serene. Certainly back then, snow and darkness and _I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you this_ were the furthest things from anyone's mind.

Closure. A shrink word. A word that floated around in her parents' mouths late at night when she lay in bed and they thought she couldn't hear them down the hall, talking about whether or not they should let her go to the funeral, the one they were having here in Toronto for the students and hockey team. A word that was printed on those pamphlets they tried to give her, for places she wouldn't go and people she wouldn't talk to. A self-help book word.

As if anyone ever really helps themselves.

"_I'm sad, and I just want it to go away."_

"Maya! Hello, earth to Maya!"

Tristan is waiting for her reply. Maya blinks. How much time has she lost? A minute? Two? She's got to stop doing this. The wrong person catches her zooming out like this, and they will Call Her Parents. They will Have A Meeting. They will Discuss Her Future. The minutes that get away from her always get tacked back into her life in those meetings, so the more time she loses the more time everyone spends talking in pamphlet words, like _therapy_ and _counseling_ and _coping_ –

"Yeah?"

"Did you hear me? About doing the project after school?"

"Yeah. Fine."

Tristan looks at her – _are you sure about that?_

She remembers another word from those shitty little pamphlets. It made her want to throw something.

_Suicide survivor._ What a stupid phrase. Nobody survived suicide. That's why it was called _suicide_.

**VI.**

_4:02 PM – Friday April 28_

The snowman's arms are flung out wide, like he's expecting someone to run right into them. There's has a red scarf around his neck, a black top hat, three buttons in the stomach section.

"_No man!"_

Dallas picks it off the shelf, gives it a little shake. As the world inside turns upside down, he turns it over in his hands, winding the little knob at the bottom and listening to the flurries fall to the beat of a twinkling lullaby. The snowman spins inside his little world, while the snow falls gently on him. After he stops moving and the music fades out, he remains frozen in his dome, encased away from any future or past, reality or fantasy.

Dallas grabs the snowglobe off the shelf, then grabs the bottled water and bag of pretzels. The bus honks outside by the pumps. After he pays the cashier, Dallas buries the snowglobe at the bottom of his backpack.

Stupid, he thinks, climbing back on the bus. Jayden can't play with a snowglobe. Vanessa probably won't give it to him, just so he won't break it and hurt himself. Or, more than likely, he thinks, she won't give him the snowglobe just out of spite.

Still, he takes care not to jostle the backpack when he takes his seat by the window. He holds it in his lap, feeling the base of the globe on his knee. The silvery tune of the music still plays in his head, replaying the same bars over and over again as the bus pulls onto the highway and into the crawling shadows of twilight.

**VII.**

_5:36 PM – Friday April 28_

"Did you figure out what we were going to do for the PowerPoint presentation?"

Tristan shrugs as his phone vibrates. "Not yet," he says, as he scrolls through his messages.

"Tori?" she guesses.

Tris shrugs. "She wants to do something later."

"Hope it's not another sushi night," Maya says, turning the page of her textbook. "I don't even _like _sushi."

Tristan looks up at her. "You know, she's only trying to be your friend. And all you do is make her feel bad for it. She's doing it for you."

"Did it ever occur to her that I don't want her help?" Maya snaps, her voice cold. "I don't, okay? She's only friends with me again because Cam's dead. And I hate her stupid pity party."

Tristan shakes his head. "It's not a pity party! She's your best friend. All she wants is to be there for you and say she's sorry. And you treat her like shit."

"God!" Maya suddenly yells. Her fist comes down on the table, and when it bangs it startles the both of them. "Be there for you"...that stupid, STUPID phrase. "Shut up! Everybody's sorry!"

"Then what else do you want us to say?" Tristan argues. "No one knows what to say because we don't want to see you sad all the time."

"I'm not SAD!" Maya replies. The words come snarling out of her like unspooled thread."I'm mad, I'm really fucking mad!" She throws her arms out. "I hate him!"

The air between them feels like a slap in the face. They must be alone in the library, because no one rushes back to shush them. For a moment all they do is stare at each other, like a bomb just went off and they're not sure if another one is going to send everything blasted to bits in the next few seconds.

"Okay," Tristan says, after a beat. "Okay. That got…a little intense."

Maya looks back at her French notes, scanning the textbook with the tip of her pen. "We need to go over conjugations," she says tonelessly.

Tristan is still staring at her.

"He loved you," he whispers, like that makes_ any _difference.

Maya glares at him. "You don't kill yourself if you love someone. You think about them, not just you. He didn't care about anyone but himself. And I hate him for it! I wish I could kill him!"

When Tristan doesn't respond, Maya calmly puts her pen down in between the pages of her textbook and looks over at Tristan.

"Here's an idea," she says. "When your boyfriend jumps off a roof and kills himself, you can tell me how I'm supposed to feel." She narrows her eyes. "But since you never had one, I don't really care what you think."

The words are brutal, and as soon as she says them, she's surprised at just how much she regrets them.

"I'm sorry," she mutters, staring at her papers.

"I know you are," Tristan says.

Maya stares at him for a moment.

"I know you didn't mean it. Like when you said you hated Cam, or when you said you didn't care about Tori. I know you don't care about anything right now, and that I'm supposed to be a good friend and blow it off and say you're grieving and in denial or whatever."

Tristan slams his notebook shut, a force that makes the entire table rock. Maya jumps.

"But other people lost Cam, too," Tristan says, his voice hard. "And we're only trying to help. We don't know how else to get through it."

The two of them just look at each other, not saying anything and not needing to.

"I'm gonna go," he says, stuffing his books in his bag. "Just email me the rest of your stuff later."

Tristan is almost out of earshot when Maya says, "I did mean it."

Tristan looks over his shoulder at her.

Maya shifts in her seat. She looks right at him, gripping the back of her chair so hard her fingers ache.

"I do hate him," she says.

**VIII.**

_5:36 PM – Friday April 28_

Dallas is about to knock on the hotel room door, case of beer in hand, when he hears the voice floating through it.

"I dunno, dude." Owen. "Something about the whole thing just bothered me."

"Coincidence?" Luke, this time.

There's a TV on in the room, and Dallas strains to hear them over it.

"It's just…" there's a moment where Owen pauses. "Look at what happened. Isn't it weird, how two months before, he 'falls' off a two-story balcony and happens to bench himself for a half a season? I mean, doesn't that seem a little too convenient? And how do you 'fall' off the catwalk, anyway?"

"Coach said he was messing around on it," he hears Luke reply. But he doesn't sound convinced; his voice sounds almost dreamy, like he's not entirely sure what he's saying.

"Doesn't it sound funny, though?" Owen says. "I don't know. Something about it's just been bugging me. It just…something about it didn't sound right, even then."

"You think he did it on purpose?" Luke.

"_Make sure Birdman doesn't slip and fall on the wet floor, break his other arm."_

"I dunno." Owen sighs, sounding very tired. "Man, it's all so fucked up."

"Yeah," Luke replies. Dallas can almost feel him nodding as his voice trails off.

Dallas leans against the wall outside the door, still clutching the cold beer. The condensation soaks into his shirt, but he doesn't even notice. He isn't aware, until his bottom hits the floor, that his legs have slipped out from underneath him, that his arms are limp, his entire body gone boneless.

"_Man, I can't believe you. Playing around on that catwalk? What did I JUST tell Luke? You were right there! What if you'd really gotten hurt! We could've been out for the entire season! What is with you?"_

"_Sorry, Dallas. I…I don't know what I was thinking."_

"_Come on, Cam! I thought you were smarter than that."_

It made sense, Dallas thinks. He hated hockey. He hated the press. The attention. And just like that, sidelined for almost the entire season. A little convenient, but of course Dallas hadn't fucking noticed. He'd been too mad they lost their star player. Didn't see ANYTHING convenient about that.

It's probably why He didn't hesitate, on the roof. If He already hurt Himself once, then it probably made it easier to do again.

He bangs his head against the wall. A dull ache pulses at the back of his skull. He tilts his head back, eyes shut.

"_Make sure Birdman doesn't slip and fall."_

"_I don't know what I was thinking."_

The spring was too perfect That Day. The sky closed its eyes on the funeral. We only see what we want to see.

**IX.**

_7:37 PM – Friday April 28_

It's like she has a force field around her. That's how she feels while she stomps home from the library, not bothering to call and wait for someone to pick her up. It takes her forever to get home, but she finds that she barely notices the weather, even as the light drops out of the horizon and everything turns to hard blues and steely greys around her. She can't feel the cold.

She throws open the door to the kitchen, flings her backpack into the window so hard that the blinds nearly come off. Kicks out of her shoes, and flings herself down on the couch, closing her eyes with her frozen hands.

There's a noise at the end of the hall.

Maya sits up, peers down the corridor. Her sister's door is shut, but the light is on underneath the door. And unless she has her computer turned up way too loudly, there's another voice in there with her.

Maya's hands try to close into fists, but her fingers are too frozen stiff. She slides them under her knees, trying to defrost them, and her body shakes, not because of the weather.

The bedroom door opens, and Katie comes out, wearing underwear and a plaid shirt and nothing else. Maya watches her go into the kitchen, a smile on her face as she grabs a bag of chips out of the pantry, then turns and sees her just standing there.

"Maya!" Her sister jumps, almost dropping the chips. "You're home early."

"So are you."

Katie tries to recover, smoothing her ponytail out and hiding her bare legs behind the kitchen counter. "I thought you were doing something with Tristan."

"We're finished. Where's Jake's truck?"

Katie's face falls. "Maya…"

"Did he park around the corner?" She shifts her weight over her hands. Feeling starts flooding back to them, pins and needles of heat.

Katie keeps her eyes on the kitchen floor, her toes curling on the tiles. "If you want him to leave, I can ask him to."

Maya stares at her knees. Her whole body ripples with something that has nothing to do with the snow, with this winter that won't end. The fury from that day under the blankets is in her mouth, iron and ugly. "I don't care what you and your boyfriend do, Katie."

Katie sighs. "We're leaving soon," she says. "Going to a garden show. Just…give me twenty minutes."

"I said," Maya says evenly, gritting her teeth and glaring at her sister, "that I don't _care_ what you and your boyfriend do."

Katie fiddles with the bag of chips, twisting the plastic clip in her hands.

"Do you want to come with us?"

Maya rolls her eyes. "To a garden show?"

"We're going out to eat afterwards." Katie tries to smile. "You can pick!"

"Sounds like a date," Maya replies.

Katie shrugs. "Jake won't care if you come."

"You don't want me there," Maya says, shaking her head. "Just get out, go on your date, do whatever."

"I don't have to go," she insists. "I can stay here, or we can go out to eat. Or we could bake…" Katie's voice trails off. "Something. Anything you want!"

Maya snorts. "What am I, three?"

Katie frowns. "I think it would be a good idea if you got out of the house, is all."

She clenches her hands into fists under her knees. "Why? So you can have more time in the shower with Jake?"

Her sister's entire body flushes. "Shut up!"

Maya glares at her. "Make me!"

"Everything okay in here?"

Jake comes in, buttoning the last button on his shirt and running a hand through his hair. He looks over at Maya, then seems to shrink back in the hall.

"We should…" he clears his throat, scratching behind his ear. "We should probably get going, Katie. Don't want to get stuck in traffic."

Katie is still glaring Maya down. When Maya looks away, Katie takes a deep breath and turns to him. "Can you go wait in the car? I'm just gonna get dressed. I'll be quick."

Jake nods, looking over at Maya. "Sure," he murmurs. Maya figures he heard the entire argument, and finds she _really_ doesn't care. Jake can go to Hell, and so can everything he's doing with Katie. She remembers all the time she covered for her sister when she was staying out past curfew with him, and wishes she could take it all back. She hates them both.

When she hears the side door click shut behind them and Jake's footsteps on the porch, Katie turns back to her, looking more sad than angry. For once, Maya wishes her sister would just be angry at her. Katie's anger is a lot less pathetic than her feeling sorry for Maya.

The pity in Katie's face makes Maya want to break it. She's so _sick_ of people looking at her like that. It's worse than people looking at her like she's a slut or a cheater or the Root of All Evil. Pity is worse than all of those combined, and it makes her want to scream at Katie until her sister starts acting like the bitch she usually is.

"I'm trying to help you, Maya," Katie whispers. "That's what we're all trying to do."

Maya rolls her eyes. "I'm not the one that needs help," she snaps.

"You sure about that?" Katie follows her as Maya gets up, stomping down the hall towards her bedroom. "You're not eating, you barely sleep, you stopped playing cello, stopped hanging out with Tori and Tristan. We're all worried about you, Maya. Mom and Dad, me, your friends, Mr. Simpson…"

_Simpson thinks I'm a murderer_, she wants to say, but instead, she stops at the bedroom door and looks Katie up and down, her naked legs and her bare belly and the way she's wrapped in Jake's shirt like his arms are still around her, smelling like wood shavings and garden mulch and sweat and probably weed (if Maya knew what that smelled like).

"Jake's waiting for you," she says coolly. "You might want to put a bra on."

She slams the door in Katie's face.

**XI.**

_8:04 PM – Friday April 28_

He's not sure whose idea it was to go to the hotel pool – after his fifth or sixth beer he stops counting, and after a while he's not really sure of anything – but he follows the rest of the guys to a room that's too hot and reeks like chlorine and feet. They jump into the water, and Dallas finds himself just floating in the shallow end while Luke does backflips off the diving board.

Looks like he misses Florida a lot more than he lets on.

_Should keep an eye on that,_ Dallas thinks idly, then tilts his head back and closes his eyes against the too-bright light of the sweaty little room. The voices of the others fade as he closes his chest like a door and lets himself sink to the bottom.

The water's so peaceful. He lets out some bubbles of air and sinks down to the floor, folding his legs underneath him and letting his arms float at his sides. It's the most amazing feeling he's had in weeks. As his lungs begin to tighten from not being able to breathe, he feels a wash of peace come over him that makes his head spin. He lets out the last of what's in his burning, screaming lungs, but no matter how badly they're craving a release he just stays at the bottom, his head feeling heavy, heavy, _too heavy, _and like he's sinking, straight through the concrete and dissolving into the tepid neon waters until he's nothing but a ripple on the surface, a trick of the light.

It makes him think of That Day, oddly enough. Being on the rooftop, seconds After – . He looked over the edge, thinking of course He landed, of course He's hit the ground, and thinking he'd see Cam running away, or just standing there, or maybe just hovering in mid-air, like the entire world had stopped, because it sure felt like it had.

So when Dallas looked over and saw nothing but a mangled sack of bones, a tiny little figure

(It shocked Dallas, how tiny he was. How little He became, when He broke. But Cam wasn't that small, so it couldn't be Him, because it was the size of a little boy…)

_Black blood on the concrete – _

And in the dark pooling stain, all Dallas could see was the sky. It was everywhere, crawling in the glimmers of light, reflecting in the darkness, the sky, the perfect, beautiful, wondrous, sprawling sky…

It had seemed completely sane, Dallas remembered, at the time. Sane to stand at the very edge of the roof and look down at that body, that broken little body

(it was just a body, it wasn't Cam, it wasn't anything but a crumpled thing, not human, not anything, not real but too real…)

And want to jump off after Him.

The pound in his chest has tapered off into a weak rattle, like a prisoner giving the bars one final shake even though he knows no one is coming to his rescue. Dallas feels his head droop with an incredible weight he can't hold up, feels the black spots sparking behind his eyes, and remembers the sparkling, vivid clarity of that moment, when he looked over the edge of the rooftop and thought the most logical thing in the world would be to simply take one more step, and go all the way down.

Something circles him, something strong and hard, and for a moment, Dallas thinks he's dreaming. But then he's brutally woken up by the force of air smacking him in the face, the gasp of his lungs as they howl and scream and gulp the humid air suddenly all around him. He opens his eyes and sees nothing but smeared color, and the overexposed light burns so badly he has to shut them again. It takes him a minute to realize what he felt circling him were someone's arms, and that someone is dragging him out of the water, slamming him down on the concrete poolside, and the jolt makes his entire body suddenly feel too awake, an adrenaline shot.

"What the hell?"

The colors behind his eyes stop blurring long enough for Dallas to make out a tall, pale form standing not too far from him. The shape is almost doubled over, like he's about to puke in the pool. It would make Dallas laugh, if he could squeeze any noise out of his lungs, which feel too wet and newborn. They throttle the air in them like they have no idea what to do with it.

Owen tries to catch his breath, wiping his mouth and looking down at him with furious eyes.

"What the hell?" he repeats. "What the fuck was that?"

"Is he okay?" someone else asks.

"What are you doing?" Owen yells. It's the only sound Dallas can hear over the rush in his ears, and the dizziness pounding through his head. It's so loud, Jesus Christ, so loud. He wonders how anyone can hear anything, over the _whoosh, whoosh, whoosh_. Even Owen's screaming at him sounds like white noise. "What the fuck!"

Dallas can barely make it out.

The shape that must be Owen jolts, like he got an electric shock.

"Shit," he yelps. "Shit. What did you _do_, man? How fucking crazy are you?"

"Owen," the voice sounds too far away for Dallas to make out, like he's hearing it through a wall, "Chill out, someone'll hear you!"

"Shut up!" Owen replies.

Owen really needs to stop shouting; Dallas's head aches, and that screaming is only making it worse.

He's dimly aware that other people are looking down at him, still sprawled out on the concrete floor. They drip on him as they stand over. He can't make out faces or voices, but he knows they're all staring right at him, like he's something they've never seen before.

Owen bends down towards him. For a minute, he looks like he's going to reach out a hand, but instead draws it back and just stares down at Dallas, still gasping and trying to breathe normally. His lungs still feel squeezed, like he's still drowning, even though he's flooded with air, not water. He can breathe, but not really.

"How messed up are you?" Owen says.

Dallas just stays on the ground.

**XII.**

_9:38 PM – Friday April 28_

It didn't take her long to find the place. What DID take her a bit longer was the bike ride down there, but then again, Maya's never biked drunk before. At least, she thinks she's drunk. Is this what drunk is, this feeling like you're about to slide apart at the seams and turn into breeze?

She remembers when she was little, how badly she wanted to fly. If this was all it took to feel like flying – a few long gulps of the silver stuff that her parents kept above the pantry – then she would have done this years ago. Why did she waste so much time being the good kid? Her sister's a freaking pill head and dating a stoner. And she hates them. Plus, she had a crazy boyfriend, so crazy he jumped off a roof. And now everyone around her thinks she's going to do the same. So why bother pretending like she's so good all the time? Everyone she knows is really crazy.

It makes her laugh. Crazy, crazy, everyone is craaaaaaazy.

The music draws her in, like a moth to the flame. With everyone busy either dancing or yelling at one another to be heard over the pound of the bass, no one notices her trip across the lawn and toss her bike aside, almost falling through the front door as she scopes her eyes out for someone she might know.

She doesn't see anyone, but she sees a table with tons of beer, and that's good enough for her. There's a tall skinny guy standing in front of it getting a drink of his own, and when she gets close enough, she sees who that guy is.

"Maya?" Zig says the word like he's pronouncing something foreign. His eyes are already kind of bloodshot, but even red they look shocked to see her. "What are you doing here?"

"It's a party!" She trips over herself a little bit – was that step always there? – but after bracing herself on the edge of a table, she grins up at Zig. "Here to have fun."

"Since when?" Zig is still staring at her. "You don't party."

"Yeah, well." Maya sees a cup filled with…something. Smells like something strong, either way. She grabs it, and tilts it back to her lips. Drains it.

Zig's face just looks so stupid and clueless, and she has to laugh at him. How silly he looks, with his dopey wide mouth and big black eye…

She grins broadly. "This is the new me."

For a while, Zig just goggles at her like he doesn't recognize her. She reaches past him and starts filling up her cup once more.

He reaches his hand up, but it only knocks some beer down her shirt. It turns the fabric darker, which makes Maya laugh.

"How many have you had?" Zig asks.

Maya shrugs. "I dunno. Since I got here, just two. But I had more. Before."

Zig's good eye widens. "You…umm…you might wanna slow down."

She giggles. "Or not."

She reaches over to take another cup, but trips over Zig's feet and nearly spills on top of him.

"Hey!" he says, catching her before they both tumble into the table. He's not very steady, either, but at least he manages to stop them from faceplanting. It makes Maya laugh again, and she reaches up to get closer to his face. Zig flushes a patchy red color, his neck blotchy and his eyes darting, as she leans into him.

"Hey," she says suddenly, "you wanna go somewhere?"

"What," Zig says. He still has that dopey, clueless look on his face. It's so adorable. And annoying. She isn't sure if she wants to throttle him or hug him or what. "You mean you and me?"

"Yeah, silly." Zig's eyes go wide. "Who else?"

Zig keeps staring at her. Throttle, Maya thinks. Definitely throttle.

"Since when do you talk to me?" he asks. "You haven't since Cam died."

Maya rolls her eyes. "Well, I wanna talk now. Come on. And get me a cup!"

Zig blinks a few times. "I don't think it's a good idea," he says.

Maya grabs his shoulders, gives them a little shake.

"No beer," she says, "no talky." Then she grips him tighter, shaking him again. "Come _on,_ Zig. I'm dying to be normal! Treat me normal, 'kay? Please?" She leans closer into him, close enough to smell the sweat and cheap beer on him. "You always treated me normal."

Zig just looks at her, mouth almost hanging open, and then he reaches over to the table and fills up a cup.

**XIII.**

_10:05 PM – Friday April 28_

In the end, somebody DID hear Owen screaming – a hotel clerk who found the boys and yelled at them for disturbing the guests with their noise. She told Coach, who yelled at all of them.

Dallas isn't sure what Owen told Coach, but he must have told him _something_, because after he dismisses them to their hotel rooms he pulls Dallas aside.

"Milligan had something to tell me," he says. "He said you were messing around and almost hurt yourself earlier. Is that true?"

Dallas shrugs. "I was being stupid. And I messed up. Owen's right about that much."

Coach stares down at him. "So that's it?"

Dallas nods. "I screwed up, and almost got hurt. It's my own fault."

Coach is still watching him, his eyes wide and unreadable.

"I was drunk," Dallas adds, knowing the rules. If Coach hears about underaged drinking, he'll be forced to suspend him due to the rules. He could face a disciplinary hearing, and might even get kicked off the team. But at the very least, Coach has to suspend him, if he decides to tell the league.

Coach runs a hand over his mouth, stroking his chin, and shakes his head.

"Look, kid," he tells Dallas. "I know you and Saunders were close, but you gotta get things together. I need you to be the captain here! This team counts on you to keep them together!"

Dallas's eyes look at the floor, at the dirty carpet identical to the one in the room he's sharing with Cody.

"If you really need to talk to someone," Coach says, "Principle Simpson left me the number of the guidance counselor assigned to Degrassi. I can give you her number if you want, but I can't have you being a mess like this and doing crazy shit! It's scaring everyone, and I need you to be the leader here! I'm really counting on you!"

Again, Dallas shrugs.

Coach sighs, and shakes his head again. He seems to shrink three sizes to Dallas when he does that.

"I don't wanna keep you out of the game tomorrow," he says. "But I can't really let you play after doing that stunt you pulled. You're out for Westview, but then you're back on the ice next week, and your principle will figure out what's a good punishment for being drunk and bullshitting around like that. For now, you're benched."

Again, Dallas shrugs. His head is too heavy and hurts too much to do much else; even the smallest motion explodes with pain.

Coach folds his arms over his chest and stares at the ground.

"I don't know what to tell you, Dallas," he says. "Except you need to deal with this."

Again, Dallas shrugs.

**IX.**

_10:05 PM – Friday April 28_

"You know," Maya tells him, as she and Zig stumble through the crowd and try to find a quieter place to talk, "I wanted to talk to you at the funeral. But there were too many people who kept getting in the way."

"Yeah," Zig says. "I wanted to talk to you, too. But Tori looked pretty mad, and I thought…"

He steps over a girl and guy making out at the bottom of a staircase, and then heads out the back door, with Maya trailing behind. They end up on the side of the house, walking towards the main road surrounded by snow-capped pines.

"I thought you'd be mad at me, too," he confesses. "I didn't think it was a good time for me to talk to you."

"I wish you had," Maya says. "I missed talking to you. You always treat me so nice."

Zig looks at her, and it's almost sad. "I wasn't always nice," he says.

"No," Maya demands, slapping his chest lightly. "You were, you were always nice! I could never talk to Cam like I talk to you. That's why he was so mean to you." Maya has to laugh. "He was never as smooth as you. He told me that once. He wasn't, smooth, like at all. He was so NOT smooth!"

Maya bursts into giggles, so hard she nearly snorts. And that makes her double over and laugh even harder, almost falling into the muddy slush at their feet.

When she finally looks up, Zig is watching her, his eyes troubled.

"I was mean to him, too," he mumbles. "I said some really mean things to Cam."

"I don't care what you said," Maya says, but Zig keeps talking like he doesn't hear her.

"The day you broke up with him, I told him I was glad. That you dumped him." Zig stares at the ground, digging the toe of his boots into the muddy slush. "I told him that he was a psycho, and that a girl like you deserved better than him, because he was bad news. And that I was glad you were finally seeing that you'd be better off without him in your life. I said that he was selfish for not breaking up with you, and you'd be happier now that he was gone. A lot happier."

His face looks almost grey in the patches of moonlight. She thinks he looks like he might actually barf, for a second.

Maya rolls her eyes. "Shut up, please."

Zig's head slowly turns to face her."What?"

"I said, shut up!" She throws her hands in the air. "You're being stupid, you know that? Nothing you said matters. I don't care what you told Cam. I don't care!" She looks up at him. "I hate Cam, Zig."

"Hate?" Zig says, in disbelief.

"I hate him! Cam. That's why I like you. Because you hated him, too!" She laughs. "Hey, if you never fought with him, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself!"

Zig leaps back from her like she shot him.

"What is wrong with you?" he almost whispers. "Why would you say that?"

"Cause it's TRUE." Maya sighs. "Come on, you think so, too. You hate him, and I hate him, too. We're haters together!"

She laughs, then reaches out and grabs his arm, ignoring that he recoils under her hand.

"You know what's really annoying?" she asks. When Zig doesn't reply, she goes on. "People keep touching me now. Like, all the time. It's like, just because my boyfriend kills himself, I have this sign that says TOUCH ME, PLEASE!" She laughs. "It needs to stop."

Zig still doesn't answer, so she keeps holding onto him. "I wanted to talk to you about that forever," she says, as they walk further away from the house. "But Katie thinks you're evil." Maya suddenly stops and looks at Zig. "Did you know she's fucking Jake? They fucked in my shower. Well, me and Katie's, but I use it, so it's mine."

She has to snicker. "My boyfriend's dead, and Katie's having sex with Jake in my shower. Katie's evil."

She smiles at Zig. "Not you. I like you."

"You need to _stop," _Zig says finally, and pulls his arm free of her hold. "Maya, you don't mean it. Any of it. You don't hate Cam."

That makes her want to blacken his other eye. "Yes, I do!" she yells. "Why does everyone tell me what I think? I hate him!" She throws her hands out. "Come on, you hate him, too! God, what's your _problem?"_

"What's YOUR problem?" Zig says. He puts his hands on his hips. "You're acting crazy!"

Maya balls up her hands in fists at her side. "Then maybe I'll go kill myself!" she screams at him.

Zig's face blanches. "Stop saying stuff!" he yells.

He stumbles away from her, nearly slipping on the icy lawn.

"You're drunk, and sound crazy," he says. "I don't want to talk to you."

Maya wonders how it can be so cold outside, when all she feels is blazing heat.

"You're supposed to be my friend!" she yells at him. "You're such a fake, _Zigmuuuuuund."_

She drags the full name out like a curse, almost spitting out the last syllable. Zig just stares at her before slowly turning and walking away, leaving her standing in the cold, patchy moonlight.

"You hate him!" Maya yells at his retreating backside. "You prob'ly like him dead! I want to kill him! I hate him! I hate _you_!"

She watches his shape disappear into the darkness, and realizes dimly how stupid she must look – stumbling around in the shadows, smelling like beer, screaming at no one. Her head aches. _I need another drink._

She heads towards the front of the house, but she can't find Zig. For some reason, that makes her throat well up, and before she knows it she's on her knees in the freezing mud, sobbing so hard her body feels the whiplash.

"Hey." There's a shadow coming towards her, and at first she thinks it's Zig, but then realizes it's too short. When it gets closer, she makes out the shape of a boy with dark skin and wild black hair, about her own age. She sort-of knows his face from around the halls, and thinks he's a Grade 10.

That knowledge makes her double over again, and she keeps staring at the ground, fat tear rolling down her warm, flushed cheeks. Why is she so hot? It's unbelievably cold, being on her knees in this wet slush.

"Hey," the shadow says again. He kneels in front of her, a cup in one hand. "Uhh, you okay?"

Maya looks at the soaking patches of her wet knees, the bits of moon poking through the silvery clouds. No stars out tonight.

"I need to pee," she says, and then almost clamps her hands over her mouth. She has no idea why that, of all the stupid things, would be the first thing she says. But now that she mentions it, she needs to pee so badly that her stomach aches.

The guy sort-of smiles at her. "Uh-huh. Well, I think you should get inside for that. You need help?"

"I hate him," Maya grunts. She puts a hand down into the snow, still in half-melted clumps on the ground. It's all muddy now, streaked with dirt and grime. She wipes the mud on her pants, watching the brown streaks stain the dark, soaking fabric.

He frowns. "Was that guy you were yelling at your boyfriend? He's a jerk." He smiles at Maya, and she's distracted enough to notice that he has a very bright grin, like he's in on a secret that no one else is and likes to gloat about it. "Nobody lets a girl as cute as you go running around by yourself this late at night."

He holds out his hand. "I'm Skye. You wanna go inside?"

Maya shrugs one shoulder. "I need to pee," she repeats. Her stomach cramps with the sudden need.

The guy takes one arm, and gently pulls her up out of the muddy ground.

"There's a clean one upstairs," he says. "Come on, I'll show you."

**X.**

_5:36 AM – Saturday April 29_

He fell with his arms outstretched. Superman, fallen to earth. As if reaching for something, and finding only cold, empty nothing in return.

When Dallas's eyes flip open, it's to a throbbing head and a nerveless arm. He has to blink a few times, staring up at the dirty ceiling, before he feels like he can sit up without falling off the edge of the planet. A few feet away from him, Cody sleeps soundly, his wet hockey gear piled on the ground between their two beds.

The room stops spinning long enough for him to take a few long, deep breaths and slither his tingling arm out from underneath his pillow. It feels heavy and lifeless, like it isn't a part of his body.

There's a moment, a memory. He's too hungover to hold it down. Jayden on a blanket, lying on his back, kicking at the ceiling. He's just grabbed his own foot, and he pulls his leg closer to shove it in his mouth. He stares at it, pulling at his toes, amazed that there's this whole other part of him he never realized was there. He has to touch it, taste it. Make sure it's real.

Dallas closes his eyes, pulls the bloodless hand into a fist. Tight, like he's about to throw a punch. His numb fingers radiate with the sting he can feel all the way up to his elbow. Keeps his eyes shut until he's positive he doesn't remember the noise Jay was making when he was chattering to himself on the blanket, or that he was wearing a blue baby suit with yellow rocket ships on it.

He left the curtains open from the night before, and a weak haze of sunlight is tapping hesitantly on the glass. It shades the room with symbols and dimness, memories and dreams. It catches the light in the broken bits of the snow globe, and the tiny fragments glitter on the dirty carpet like bits of rainbows shattered on the ground. The sun is starting to just come up, bringing a hazy dawn of silver and gold smoke over the dingy highway lights. The pull of the dawn slices over the dark pines, lighting the sky with a dirty nickel sunrise.

Before –, Dallas shared a hotel room with Him in Windsor, before their last away tournament. Cam fell asleep before him, and when Dallas drifted off it was to the sound of Cam breathing like a tide, in and out, in and out, from the bed next to His. The room was so small and the beds so close it was possible to reach over and touch the edge of the other bed; to close the distance just an arm's length away.

The whole weekend, and Dallas never noticed.

There's a faint cry in the wind, and a flash outside his window. A little red bird dips in the morning shadows. It flies into the dawn, trilling like a fortune teller, into the last pieces of the night.

**XI.**

_6:03 AM – Saturday April 29_

She wakes up with a spinning head and a roiling stomach. She stumbles to the bathroom, leaning her head over the toilet bowl, and breathes slowly and deeply as she waits for the waves of nausea to pass.

Eventually, her gut stops doing back-flips, but it hurts so much to lift her head that she keeps it low to the ground, until her cheek is nearly pressed against the cool tiles of the bathroom floor.

Maya takes a few more deep breaths, closes her eyes. She doesn't remember how she got home from the party, or even what she really _did_ at the party. She remembers beer, Skye, Zig. _Zig._ Talking. But about what, she doesn't remember.

And really, does she need to know?

Another thing comes to Maya as she kneels on the freezing floor – she doesn't remember having bad dreams. She doesn't remember dreaming at all. Or falling asleep, or trying to fall asleep, or closing her eyes and instead finding only red bandannas, holding hands, white flowers on blood-stained concrete and the beat of a living, pumping, healthy heart beneath her eardrums, rhythmic as a song. She doesn't remember trying to sleep, and fighting the memory of warm, strong arms circling her; of feeling safe, loved, happier than she could ever remember.

She remembers nothing.

As she presses a cool hand to her forehead, still throbbing, she takes a deep breath and thinks, _I should try this more often. _


	6. Chapter 6

**Author's Note: Sorry about the delay. I didn't mean for a long wait between chapters, but life got a little out of hand the last few weeks and I had a hard time making myself sit down and write something so heavy. Starting to bounce back slightly, though. **

**Twitter: AlbatrossTam14**

**Tumblr: welldeservedobscurity**

**I don't own Degrassi.**

**I.**

Twilight falls fast in this frozen spring snowglobe, changing from grey to blue to black without ever being able to pinpoint exactly when or where it changes. Outside her window, everything's drowned in shadows, abandoned by the stars. She can see in the distance some of the city's high rises, the only structure rising out of the oblivion swallowing everything else around her.

Tonight, she sits in her dark bedroom, the only light coming from the lamp on her nightstand. Her headphones are plugged in as her iPod plays the Black Keys, and she tries to work on the algebra assignment for Armstrong's class. She really wants to crawl back under the covers and sleep until someone forces her to deal with tomorrow, but she's failed one test and gotten three incompletes, and Armstrong has threatened a parent conference dad if her marks drop any lower.

Normally, she and Tori would do the homework together. They'd either study at each other's houses, or just chat via Facetime, talking each other through it. But Tori's got some end-of-the-year theatre club banquet tonight, and Maya can't help but be glad. She hasn't told her about the party – doing that would mean telling her about getting drunk, fighting with Zig, meeting Skye. And she doesn't feel like dealing with Twenty Questions Tori.

_Not that it's any of her business, anyway,_ Maya tries to remind herself.

She sighs, pushing the algebra aside. Polynomials and variables; a foreign language. Though it shouldn't surprise her that she doesn't understand it. After only a few weeks in this new world, she's all but forgotten Regular People Talk. Now she's like the Tower of Babel – everything that used to make sense turned on its head, unfathomable. At least that's one thing all the scattered bits of her can agree on; they can't seem to work together anymore, don't fit together. They don't speak the same memories, the same ideas.

Maya wrestles her French notebook out from the bottom of her backpack, hesitating the briefest moment before opening it.

The party was fun. The party was uncomplicated. Well, she amends, everything after Zig had been uncomplicated. At least, she thinks it was. She's still pretty fuzzy on the details, and wonders exactly how drunk she managed to get.

But really, does it matter? She had _fun._ For the first time in…god, who knew how long, she had actually gotten out and had _fun_. Nobody crying around her, nobody expecting her to cry or thinking she was had one foot already in the grave. Nobody asking her how she felt, if she was okay, if she needed anything, or looking at her like she was the Devil Incarnate. Nobody "being there for her". For once, she just got to be normal. And it felt so _good._

_So fucking good_, she tries out, and discovers she likes the taste of the thought. It's foreign, but then again, so was the burn of the vodka she swiped from her parents, and she'd gotten used to that fast enough.

Hell, that was normal, too. Rebelling teenagers. That's what everyone expected. She was supposed to do crazy stuff – _shit_, she amends – to…test boundaries. Push limits. Test her parents. What all those teen pamphlets said.

_Guess I'll keep testing away_, she thinks.

A smile creeps onto her face. She has Skye's number saved into her phone, and today at school, she saw him in the caf during lunch. He didn't say anything to her, but she caught his eye when she was waiting in line for tater tots, and he grinned at her before she looked away, smiling and biting her lip.

She didn't need Tori looking at her the way she did, when Maya would explain to her about the drinking. About the fight. About the…whatever it was with Skye. Tori didn't need to know every bit of her private business, and certainly had no right to judge Maya for it, or try to play therapist with her.

Maya doesn't need a therapist. She needs…she needs more _fun_. Needs to feel like that again, because it's better than anything right now. Certainly better than being Babel. Or being a frozen spring wasteland. Or a fading star, barely hanging in a broken orbit, shaped by a loss of galaxy.

There's a sudden banging on her bedroom door that startles her, and she topples her homework accidentally, French binder clattering to the floor.

"What?"

"Maya!" Katie keeps banging on the door. "Come on out! You need to see this!"

"It's fascinating," Maya shouts back. "Now go away."

Katie keeps banging on the door. Maya glares at it, willing her to stop.

To her sister's credit, Katie hasn't been carrying on so openly with Jake anymore. Maya has yet to come home to them having sex in the shower again, or find her sister naked in the kitchen. When Jake drives the two of them home in the afternoons, she tunes out the two of them talking in Greenpeace, and focuses on Katie's ponytail bobbing in all the right places while Jake goes on about summer corn or rhododendrons.

Right now, he is obsessed with berries. All kinds – blue, black, ras, straw, supercalifragilisticexpialid ocious. He's been talking about planting an entire separate garden just for different types of berries for the summer, when they're at their peak growing season. It's a berry-palooza.

Maya can't say she minds. Now that Katie's out trying this whole new concept called discretion, she's out with Jake a lot more than she's home. One less person to hover over her when she decides to sleep the afternoon off, or does an Oscar-worthy job of picking at her dinner instead of eating it.

Except, apparently, tonight.

Katie gives one last bang on the door, then stops. Maya lays back down in bed, about to curl under the unmade covers that smell too much like her when a small envelope is pushed underneath the door.

She almost wants to crawl in bed, but instead she climbs out of her bed and picks up the envelope, sees the official seal of the Toronto Young Philharmonics Orchestra.

Maya stares at it for a minute or two before she remembers. Last November. Miss Oh told her that TYPO was holding spring auditions. At the time, it had seemed silly. But somehow, an audition tape was sent.

Now, she can't even remember why.

Staring at the envelope in disbelief, she pads into the kitchen, dazed and still gripping the letter with sweaty hands. Katie's sitting at the kitchen counter, and practically pounces on Maya when she wanders in.

"Is that what I think it might be?" she asks.

Maya keeps staring at the letter. "Uhh…if you're thinking your acceptance to Stanford, you might not want to get your hopes up. It's a little skinny."

Katie doesn't bother, just snatches the letter out of her hands and ignores Maya's indignant "hey!".

"Dear Ms. Matlin," Katie reads, a smile brimming at the corners of her mouth, "we are proud to inform you that you have been selected by the Toronto Young Philharmonics Orchestra for an audition on May 13, 2012 at 4:oo PM. The audition will take place in the Kane School of Music at Toronto University. We wish you the best of luck."

Katie puts the letter down on the counter and throws her arms around Maya. "You did it, Chicken Little!"

When Maya doesn't move, Katie pulls back.

"What's the matter?" she asks. "I thought you would be through the roof to get an audition."

Maya shakes her head. "Yeah. No, I am. I am."

Katie raises her eyebrows. "If you're excited about it, then why are you shaking your head?"

The door slams, startling them both, and their parents come in, arms laden with grocery bags.

"What's going on?" her mom asks. She looks at them and grins. "Someone looks happy."

When Maya doesn't say anything, Katie beams. "Maya got an audition with TYPO!"

"The dumbest acronym ever," Maya mumbles, but her parents both give smiles so wide and bright that practically blind her.

"Maya, that's fantastic!" Her father pulls her into a tight embrace. "Isn't that rare?"

Maya shrugs one shoulder. "Yeah, pretty much."

"It's really rare!" Katie gushes. "Maya, you told me they never audition anyone under sixteen! I didn't even know you sent them a submission video!"

"I did it months ago," Maya says. "Like, before Christmas Break. It was kind of on a whim. I basically forgot all about it."

"Well, honey, we definitely need to celebrate!" Her mom is already heading towards the fridge. "What can I make you? Fried chicken? Lasagna? Or do you want me to make you my German chocolate cake for dessert, and we can just all go out for dinner?"

Maya's dad gives her another squeeze, and a kiss on the head. Katie is still holding her letter and smiling, and her mother is rifling through every shelf on the fridge. They look so happy, so hopeful, so pleased that Maya forces herself to smile, her mouth fighting the movement.

"I guess pizza couldn't hurt," she says.

**II.**

He stops on his way home from hockey practice at the old pool, peering through the slats of the chain-link fence. It's too cold to even consider swimming, but he still looks at the cover pulled tightly over the surface with longing, wishing things were as simple as boosting himself over, throwing his shirt off, and diving right in. Nothing but the smooth glide of water, the ripple of the moon on the surface, the burn of chlorine in his eyes. Nothing to think, hear, feel, except the pound of his heart beating directly in his ears, blocking out everything else. It was always so quiet here, so safe.

Giving the snow-dusted cover one last look through the fence, he turns and heads back towards the Torreses, trying not to jostle his backpack too much.

Stupid, he had told himself, when he picked it up on the way back. He knew it was a bad idea the first time he bought it. Jay couldn't play with something made out of heavy glass. He'd cut himself for sure. Dallas should have bought him a toy truck, or blocks. Something sturdy he couldn't hurt himself with. Something he could actually, you know, _play_ with. Because that's what you gave to kids.

But he still hoists his backpack higher on his shoulders, trying not to jar it too hard. He can feel the outline of the globe poking through into his back. He was a little disappointed he couldn't find any that weren't Christmassy, but he found the least corny one he thought he'd find – one with the Polar Express train chugging across a snow-strewn track, fighting its way through the blizzards of circumstance whenever someone tipped their hands.

Even if Jayden couldn't play with it, it could be…something. Something to look at, to listen to the music. Something to bring out at Christmas, like the tree or stockings. Something. Anything at all.

He has no idea what or why. Just tries to hold the pack steady, and heads back to the Torreses, head tucked against the black, icy night.

**III.**

"So, your audition's today?"

Maya nods, poking at the leftovers from last night's dinner at Little Miss Stakes. Her parents had insisted on taking them all out to eat, and then splurged on dessert, something they never did. They had toasted Maya with root beer floats, and all the while Maya hung a smile on her face from hinges that felt so rusted they were sure to snap at any moment. Right after they finally made it home, she crawled into bed still in her clothes and fell asleep, claiming a headache to her parents so they'd just stop talking to her about the stupid audition and let her sleep, already.

Apparently Katie had blabbed about it on Twitter, though, because as soon as she put her head down Tori texted her, wanting to congratulate her and hear the whole story. Maya turned her phone off, threw it under her bed, and had sighed, knowing she'd get her ear talked off the next day.

She'd been right, of course.

Tori dabs mayo from the corners of her mouth. "That's so exciting! Can we watch?"

Maya shrugs. "Uhhh…not sure. I think it's kind of a private thing."

"Too bad," Tori says. "I always loved having my mom in the audience when I did pageants; it really helped, knowing there was one friendly face out there who really wanted me to win."

Maya nods and agrees without really hearing her, taking another bite out of mashed potatoes. It lodges in her throat like sand, and when she swallows it she swears she can feel it soaking her up inside like a sponge.

Tori keeps stealing glances at her, waiting for Maya to say more, but after another awkward silence and a few bites of her turkey wrap, she turns to Tristan, and they start discussing last night's episode of _West Drive_. It's a mercy when the lunch bell rings and she' a step ahead of both of them out the door.

"Maya. Hey, hey Maya!"

Her head snaps up at the sound of her name. Tori and Tristan's do as well, their conversation abruptly stopped as they look around.

Skye casually lopes up to her, smiling that secret smile he has, a cat toying with a mouse.

"So I had a great time with you," he says.

Maya blinks at him. She can feel Tris and Tori's confused eyes on her. The questioning judgment in their stares makes her feel annoyed, bolder.

"Yeah," she says. "I had fun, too."

Skye's lazy smile widens. "You ever thought of hanging out more?"

Maya grips her books so hard their edges dig into her skin. "Really?"

Skye nods. "Yeah. You're pretty cool. So, what are you doing after school?"

Maya hopes to God she's not blushing as hard as she thinks she is. What is wrong with her? Why is she even blushing, anyway?

"Today?"

He laughs. "Yeah. What's going on?"

She almost blurts out "nothing!" before remembering the letter from the other day.

"I can't," she says, feeling more disappointed than she thought she would. "I have an appointment. I can't really miss it."

Skye shrugs, unconcerned. "Okay, well, text me whenever you're free. I'd love to hang out."

Maya grins so wide she feels like that cat from _Alice in Wonderland_.

"Sure," she tries not to stammer. "Definitely. I'll let you know."

The hidden smile is back, full-force.

"Great," he says.

Maya stands there for a minute, watching him saunter off with her books squashed against her chest, before turning and heading down the hallway.

"Who was that guy?" Tori asks, as they slide into their seats in algebra.

Maya shrugs, trying not to smile. "Just someone I met."

"Met where?" Tori's brow furrows. "Why'd he say he had a great time with you?"

Maya sighs. "Probably because we hung out. At a party. Nothing big. But he was fun to talk to."

Tori's eyes widen. "A party? Since when do _you_ go to parties, Maya Matlin?"

"Since I like going to them," she snaps, rounding on her. "Why do you care, anyway?"

Tori bites her lip, eyes wide and surprised at her tone. "It's just…it doesn't sound like you, is all."

The door to the classroom clicks shut, and Armstrong starts writing on the board.

"Polynomials," he says. "We'll be going over some of the examples from the book, but first, everyone's homework from last night. Pass to the front."

Crap. Maya sighs. Oh well. What's another forgotten homework assignment, another incomplete, another missed mark.

She looks over at Tori, still watching her out of the corner of her eye.

"It doesn't matter if I want to party or not," she hisses.

Tori frowns helplessly. "I know it doesn't, Maya. I'm just worried."

"Well, don't be!"

"Miss Matlin. " Mr. Armstrong comes to stand in between their two desks. "Miss Santamaria. Discussing last night's homework, I presume?"

Maya throws Tori another look, then slinks down in her seat. "No, sir."

"Sorry, Coach," Tori mumbles at the same time.

Maya feels her face heat up as the class turns to look at them. She scribbles into the margins of her notebook, fiercely ignoring their stares.

_Why does it matter what I do with my time now_? She thinks. Tori's words make her angrier and angrier the more she thinks about them, until she's grinding her teeth loud enough she swears the rest of the class can hear. _I can do whatever I freaking want. I don't answer to Tori, or Tris, or anyone._

She thinks back to Skye. His easy lope, the casual tease in his voice, the smile that dares you to find out what's behind it. It makes her face heat up, but for a different reason this time.

_There's nothing wrong_, she thinks firmly, as she digs the tip of her pen farther into the paper, _with having some fun._

**IV.**

"Guess what?"

Adam's voice chirps inches away from his head, lying flat on the lunch table. Dallas feels like swatting him like a fly, but feels like Adam's mom wouldn't appreciate that. Neither would Adam, and Dallas needs him to cover for him later tonight; he has to see Vanessa.

"What?" he mumbles blearily. Getting two, three hours of sleep at a stretch is really starting to catch up with him.

"Drew's running for president next year! Against _Clare_." Adam laughs. "Man, he has _no_ idea what he's gotten himself into."

"Drew and Clare?" Dallas has to smile in spite of himself. "Should be interesting."

Adam rolls his eyes. "More like a bloodbath. Clare refuses to let this thing go. I saw her in the M.I. lab during study period; she's already written her campaign speech. Dude, it's almost eleven pages. I kid you not." He laughs. "I wanted to tell her she's basically giving Drew the election that way."

Dallas forces another smile. "We'll see."

Adam's grin slides into a worried look he can't quite hide. "Man, you okay? You look beat."

Dallas grunts. "Tired. Hockey."

Adam nods, staring down at his sandwich, but Dallas can see the worry on his face. He looks away from it.

"So," Adam says after a bit, "feel like helping out later tonight? We're all going over to Fiona's to brainstorm for Drew's campaign. Should be fun."

"I kind of have something to do tonight," Dallas says. "But could you cover for me with your mom?"

Adam raises an eyebrow. "What kind of something?"

Dallas shoots him a look. _None of your business._

Adam frowns, but he bites his lip and nods his head. "I guess I can do that."

He sighs. "Thanks, man. I owe you one."

A small grin comes back to Adam's face, though not enough to wash away the worry there.

"Dude, you owe me way more than one," he says, smiling at Dallas. "And you can start paying me back with a game of Halo. You, me, and Drew, this weekend?"

The grin is contagious. Adam's kind of enthusiasm is hard to tamp down; Dallas has to lend him that one. "You're on."

His phone buzzes, and almost like a premonition, Dallas closes his eyes and sighs. He knows who it is before he flicks the screen on.

_Remember tonight._

Vanessa.

He squints at the screen. Too tired to duke it out with her right now, but her tone pisses him off.

"_No man!"_

Jayden's running in the snow at the empty park. The deserted playground, dripping with ice. Vanessa throws back her head and laughs, a bright bell chime that ripples through the silver cold.

He closes his eyes, willing the images away.

_Dont need to threaten me. I'll be there_

He almost hits SEND, his finger hovering over the button a moment, before deleting the message and typing a new one.

_After dinner. I'll text u when I'm on my way._

After a moment, she replies: _J goes to bed at 7. Come after that. If ur here he wont sleep_

He frowns. So what, he's not even allowed to see Jayden? Says who?

_I'll let u know when I can get there_

Vanessa's respone is so lightning fast he can imagine the fury on her face, picture her fingers

(long, elegant, holding a cigarette and punctuating the air with smoke as she laughs)

flying across her phone.

_Whatever. Do what u want. U always do_

He glares at the phone, remembering her words as he left them in the park.

_Hypocrite_, he thinks, surprising himself at how bitter and vicious the voice in his head sounds.

**V.**

She zips her cello back in its bag, surprised she feels so calm. This is something she's waited years for; she thought it would be a little more…nerve-wracking.

Maya sighs. She's run through her audition piece three times since school let out. Each time was perfect. She's been ready for this for months. No reason to BE nervous; she's as prepared for this audition as she could ever be. It's not like she hasn't dreamed about this, worked hard for it since she was, like, six.

Her phone buzzes in her back pocket, and Maya pulls it out, expecting her dad.

Instead, it's Skye. Her hands almost drop the phone when she sees the message:

_You busy l8r 2nite after ur appt?_

She has to smile. _How much later? _

Another text, this time from her dad, telling her he's here. With a sigh, she slings her cello bag over her shoulder and heads towards the carpool circle.

"Maya!"

She looks up. Tori is practically sprinting down the hallway towards her. Maya narrows her eyes; the two of them hadn't spoken since the algebra this morning, and during Media Immersion Maya took the seat on the other side of Tristan instead of her usual spot between him and Tori. But instead of saying anything, Tori just took the other chair and stayed silent the entire class.

"You headed to your audition?" she asks breathlessly.

Maya nods. "My dad's here."

"Well," Tori says. "good luck, okay?"

She looks like she wants to throw her arms around Maya, but just restrains herself.

"You deserve to get it," she says, trying to smile. "You'll do fine, I promise. Totally NO need to be nervous."

"I'm not," Maya says.

Tori tries to smile again, then looks down at the floor.

"Look," she says. "I'm sorry about this morning. Okay? Really, really sorry. I didn't mean to sound so…judgey. I promise. I'm not judging you at all for going to the party. I was just worried, is all."

"Worried about what?"

Tori hesitates a second. "It just surprised me. You never went to parties before, and that guy…"

Maya bristles. "You don't even KNOW Skye."

"And you do?"

She thinks of the texts he just sent her. "He's a nice guy, if you'd give him a chance."

Tori frowns. "I've heard about the people he hangs out with. Maybe he is a nice guy, I don't know, but the people he hangs out with…they're not nice people."

Maya rolls her eyes, turning away from Tori. "I need to go," she says. "My dad's here."

"Wait!" Tori cries. "Maya, wait! I'm sorry, okay, I just want to make sure you don't make a mistake!"

"With what?" Maya whirls around. "I don't need your _permission_ to go out to a party. I don't need to feel bad every time I talk to a guy. I don't need you judging me for every decision I make."

She almost turns away, but then pivots back to Tori.

"Guess what?" Maya yells. "I'm not a freaking widow! I'm allowed to move on with my life!"

She turns and stomps down the hallway. Behind her, she can hear Tori, sniffling quietly, still rooted in place. Maya doesn't look back, just walks straight out the front doors to her dad, sitting in his idling car.

Her dad smiles and puts her cello in the backseat. "All ready, Maya-May?"

She makes herself smile. "Ready as I'll ever be, I guess."

"You know whatever you do, your mom and I are proud of you," he says. "We're going to be no matter what."

Maya looks out the window. The school looks so frozen and empty under the blank slate sky, so abandoned.

"I know, Dad," she murmurs.

Her phone vibrates once again. Hoping it's not Tori, Maya grits her teeth and pulls it out of her pocket.

_Txt me when ur done. We can hang then_

She reads Skye's message over and over again, the entire drive there.

**VI.**

There's still a six pack left in the equipment closet. Good. He snatches a few cans and tosses them in his bag, ducking out as soon as he doesn't see anyone coming down the hall. Normally, he'd just sit in there with the guys as they toss a few cans back on that old stained couch, but now all he wants is a place where no one can interrupt him. Empty, solitary quiet.

The roof comes to mind, then makes him stop in place. Not the roof…

_(Black blood on the concrete – )_

Simpson padlocked the door, anyway.

With a sigh, he heads to the darkest, emptiest place he can think of.

As predicted, the theatre is so deserted he can hear his footsteps echo as he walks down the aisles. He sits at the end of the stage, legs dangling over the edge, and gulps one down, the longing _pfft_ of the can and the gurgle of his swallows sounding magnified in the silence.

Except, not quite. There's a scratching sound Dallas hears coming from behind the heavy velvet curtain, then a sound like footsteps. Dallas gets up and peers behind the folds, surprised to see Eli Goldsworthy sitting in the corner, his face pale and his hands shaking. When he sees him, Eli's eyes widen, and Dallas can see the dark circles underneath them – apparently, Dallas isn't the only one who isn't sleeping these nights.

Eli looks up at him, his expression sullen. "Fantastic," he mumbles. "And here I thought I was alone."

Dallas narrows his eyes. "Same here."

Eli's arms fold over his chest. "So, mind finding another hiding spot? Cause this one's kinda taken."

He remembers that fight at Fiona's, can still feel that fucking punch in the nose. Little asshole.

"Depends," he drawls. "Who're you hiding from?"

"None of your business," Eli snaps. "Move it."

Dallas throws up his arms in surrender. "Free country, man."

Eli scowls. "How's that nose coming along? Healing nicely? You know, I heard it's hard to make your face look the same after it gets broken like that."

Dallas takes one slow sip from the can. "Who're you hiding from?" he repeats.

Eli sighs, glaring at the floor with his arms still crossed. He looks so royally _pissed off_, and everything about this would be really funny if it had happened a few months ago, but now, Dallas doesn't really have the heart anymore to kick the hornet's nest. Again.

Instead, he reaches into his bag and pulls out one of the beers. Pushes it towards Eli, who arches one eyebrow and frowns even harder, if that's possible.

"Seriously?"

Dallas shrugs. "Looks like you could use one."

He jumps off the stage, and without waiting for a response, walks out of the dark, mostly-empty theatre, leaving Eli alone with his shadows and shaking hands. As he heads for the door, he can hear the lid of the can being popped, the throaty chug as Eli tips it back.

**VII.**

"Are you next?"

A girl with a violin case smiles at her from across the hallway.

Maya tries to smile back. "Yeah."

"Good luck," she says. "I heard the president of TYPO's one of the judges."

Maya shrugs, feeling vaguely itchy. It may be the collar on the blouse she's wearing, but she thinks it comes from someplace she can't actually scratch.

A woman pokes her head in the hallway. "Maya Matlin?"

She stands up, knees shaking. "Here."

The woman nods. "They're ready for you."

Maya nods. The other girl gives her one last look before Maya hauls her cello into the stage room, and Maya tries to smile back.

There's a single seat resting under lights that blind her; she sits down, arranging her cello, and tries not to stare into the lights, unable to see anything past the blinding sheen.

"Name?"

A disembodied voice echoes through the empty auditorium. Maya looks in the general direction of the judge's booth, where the shapes of people she can't make out sit behind a long panel.

She clears her throat. "Maya Matlin." Her own voice doesn't echo nearly as much.

"Whenever you're ready," the same disembodied voice calls.

Maya nods, gathering her bow. She takes a deep breath, trying to clear her mind, and prepares the image of her perfect performance in her mind.

"_It's okay. I've got clovers, too."_

Boxers. Her lucky boxers. She forgot them. She forgot to pack them with her blouse. She's reminded of this just now, as she arches her bow along the taut strings of her instrument.

Something about this fact jars her. She doesn't have her clovers. She's always had them for luck, and now she doesn't.

There's a distant hum she hears in the back of her mind; at first, she doesn't recognize the sound, but then she feels her limbs moving, and notices she's playing her piece. When did she start? Where is she on the page? Where are her clovers, where are they, why aren't they with her; she needs them, how could they be gone when she needs them?

Needs, needs, needs –

She starts to think of all the words she said to Him – "you went crazy!" "I can't trust you, not like this", "it's like I don't even know you anymore, Cam" – and the ones she didn't – "how could you/ why would you/ I hate you!/ why / why/ why" – the words that people didn't say after someone died because you couldn't, they were too raw and could cut you open, drain you, bleed you dry.

It all goes through her, and she blasts it all out in one long, deafening groan. It pours out of the strings of her cello under those too-bright lights, one endless banshee shriek: singing karaoke, kissing on Madame Jean-Aux's desk before class, sharing a pack of Sour Straws at the movies while Katie scowled beside them, cuddling on the couch while they Youtubed funny cat videos, painting her face with Ice Hound colors for a game, her charm bracelet, holding hands at lunch, sharing a root beer float at Little Miss Steaks –

And she's lost her clovers. How could they be lost? When she needed them so much?

Why?

It takes her only a few measures to realize that the music she's playing isn't actually her piece at all. Instead, it's a wild, uncontrollable howl ripping through the silent auditorium, like it wants to tear the place apart board by board, brick by brick. Some part of her is aware that she's the one making that noise, but another part of her keeps going, not caring what the judges must think.

Inside of her, she can _feel _the perfection of her months-rehearsed piece, but the wild, heartbroken scream of her strings keeps pounding away. The more she tears away, the more the cello sounds like grief; like bone-deep loss, wave after wave of the most guttural, bottomless, earth-shaking cry. A language of sorrow. A language you didn't pick up any other way unless you've been shattered, and come to realize you no longer have the words to describe what it is you have become since.

This is the language she's become, these days. She's become the morning when she woke up and couldn't remember his younger brother's name. The day she stopped remembering what his clothes smelled like, or his favorite pizza topping; she'd become someone unable to remember the taste of his name in her mouth, slipping from her tongue to his.

She doesn't consider giving up. Just keeps playing, keeps thinking that eventually, the notes she wants to will be heard through the howl; that somehow, the judges will hear every fluid, graceful arc of her bow along the belly of her cello, and be swept away by a melody she could play in her dreams.

When she finally finishes attacking her instrument, she gets up, bows to the judges like she knows she's supposed to. Monotones "thank you for your time", turns on her heels. She can feel sweat pouring from her underarms, soaking through her t-shirt, and her fingers are fat as sausages, swollen and red. The judges are silent, and she can imagine through the blinding lights that they're staring at her with white faces and mouths hanging open.

She hates them all.

With her cello on her back, she marches back down the hallway, ignoring the curious looks of the others and the girl she talked to earlier who asks, "So, how'd you do?". Heads straight out into the cold, standing on the front steps of the building. Snow has begun to fall since she went inside, but she doesn't shiver, even as it falls on her shoulders and dots her eyelashes, like tears frozen in their place.

**VIII**

When he gets to Vanessa's hotel room, the first thing he hears is Jayden shrieking. Bracing himself for the impact, he waits for Vanessa to open the door.

When she does, she's wearing a t-shirt streaked with something he doesn't want to think about, and Jayden is howling in her arms. His face is so blotchy and swollen Dallas wonders how long he's been crying, and judging by the circles under Vanessa's eyes, it's been awhile.

She glares at him. "I told you to come after seven."

He narrows his eyes. "I did. It's seven-fifteen."

"You could have called ahead."

"Sorry I'm not psychic." He winces as Jayden lets out another wail.

The minute he sees Dallas, he starts reaching.

"Daddy!" he cries. He fights Vanessa for all it's worth, his small body pushing and arching away from her. "Daddy!"

Jayden continues to chant his name; when Vanessa tries to hold him back, he fights harder. Finally, Dallas reaches out, and takes the damp, overly-warm body from Vanessa, tucking the boy on his side before he can think about what he's doing too much.

Almost immediately, Jayden stops. Grins at Dallas, pulls on the collar of his shirt. Buries his hot little face in his neck, and it makes Dallas squirm a little. But it's not an entirely unwelcome feeling, even as Jayden pushes harder against him, like he needs to be fused to him, buried under his bones, wrapped in his skin.

At least the crying stopped.

Vanessa runs a finger through her hair and sighs. "Of course he'd stop now," she mumbles.

"Not my fault," Dallas shrugs. Jayden's legs can almost wrap around his middle; he hoists the boy higher, almost resting him on his shoulder.

Vanessa gives him a dirty look. "Great. Now he'll never go to sleep."

"What's wrong with him?"

"Nothing," she scowls. "He's just sick of being cooped up all day. And he didn't nap. So he's been extra crabby."

She crosses her arms over her chest and rubs her eyes. She looks so tired that he has to feel for her; he knows what she feels like.

"Did you guys eat?" he asks

She glares at him. "No, I let him starve."

He rolls his eyes, any sympathy he had draining away. "Whatever, V."

Jayden's fingers scratch at his collar, at his chin; his warm palms rest on his cheek, over his forehead. It feels weird, but Dallas doesn't swat the little boy's hands away.

After a beat, she stares at the ground and shakes her head. "I was going to take him to Burger King, but he wouldn't stop carrying on."

"Burger King?" He tries to smile at her. "You can do better than that. Come on, put some shoes on, we'll go out for dinner."

She stares at him for a moment. "Why?" she asks, sounding wary.

He shrugs. He doesn't know why, either. But he just says, "come on. Where's his coat?"

The faceless Italian chain one block away from the hotel is mostly empty. On the way over there, Jay grabs one of each of his and Vanessa's hands, and demands to be swung between them. Dallas hesitates a moment, but then finds himself lifting Jayden off the ground as Vanessa tries to keep up her end, while Jayden kicks his legs gleefully whenever they're off the ground and demanding for more when he lands.

They settle into a booth in the corner. Vanessa orders pasta for Jayden, and Dallas orders a large pizza – half cheese, half peppers and olives.

She looks up at him sharply when he says that.

"What?" he asks, sounding a lot more defensive than he meant to.

He expects an angry response, but instead she watches him for a long time, before mumbling, "I didn't know you still remembered I liked that."

He shakes his head. "How could I not? It's the only thing you ever eat. That, and Mexican."

And ginger ale. She drank that by the truckload when she was pregnant.

He shakes his head. Why would he remember that? Why is he even _thinking_ about that?

He clears his throat. Vanessa does the same, and they both look away, studying the menu or the pattern of the sticky tablecloth or the drip of condensation down their water glasses. Beside Vanessa, Jayden scribbles on his kid's menu, oblivious, chattering to himself under his breath.

Vanessa pokes at the ice in her drink. She takes the lemon rind off the edge, and turns it over in her hands.

"Remember when he was a baby," she murmurs, "and my granddad used to put a lemon rind on his tongue?"

Dallas tries not to smile at that. "Yeah."

He waits for her to say more – or maybe she's waiting for him – but either way, no one says anything, and it dissolves into silence again as they look away.

The waiter brings the bowl of pasta first, which Jayden attacks with a glee and ferocity that makes Dallas forget his own hunger and just watch. It's better than witnessing Adam attack a four-cheese double stuffed pizza, and THAT is something impressive in and of itself.

"Is he for real?" he says, as Jayden dunks his hand in the pasta bowl and wiggles the strands between his fingers.

Vanessa laughs. "He loves spaghetti. It's his favorite food." She tickles Jay's stomach. "Because it looks like WORMS!"

Jay throws back his head and giggles, holding out his hands to Vanessa. "Worms!" he repeats. "Ewww!"

She makes a face. "Ewwww!" she repeats, sticking out his tongue to him.

He watches the two of them dissolve into laughter, as she pokes his stomach and he sticks his butter-covered hands at her.

"My silly guy," she sing-songs, ruffling Jayden's hair. "My silly-willy little guy."

Something in her face changes; a shadow, or a ripple. It passes over her features almost too fast for him to see, but it's there – her eyes dim, her hand steadies on the top of his head. She pauses, her mouth tilted down, her face frozen.

It hits him for the first time, completely clear:

_She can't do it._

Then she's back, sipping her water like nothing happened. He watches her eyes, dry and expressionless. She stares at the ice in her drink, stirring her straw around in circles.

"I still can't believe you remembered the pizza," she says

**IX.**

"Thanks for picking me up."

Skye grins over at her. "No problem," he says. "You get done what you needed to?"

The audition come back to her, the explosion of noise and notes. She pushes the memory down.

"Yeah. It was stupid, anyway. Don't know why I wasted time with it."

Skye turns up the stereo.

"So," he says, "you still up to hanging out?"

She smiles over at him. Between the teasing lope of his smile and the blast of his radio, the catastrophe of her audition just dissolves into nothing.

"Nope." Her parents think she's with Tori and Tristan, celebrating her audition. "I'm a free agent."

He laughs. "That sounds good."

**X.**

Because Jayden isn't used to having guests, he's too wired to sleep when they get back to the hotel. When he does crash, it's amidst many more tears and tantrums. Vanessa gives Dallas the Evil Eye through it all when she tries to wrestle the boy into his PJs, and eventually he's banished into the hallway, causing Jay to throw another fit that's over almost as soon as it begins.

Kids. Like snowstorms in April.

Because he is not allowed to say goodnight to him, Dallas stands behind the door as Vanessa puts their son to bed. He listens to Jayden's howls turn into insistent tears, then lose their volume as he settles into the occasional sulky sob. Finally, Dallas hears nothing except Vanessa, speaking so quietly he can't make out what she's saying.

When Jayden was born, there was this song Vanessa's grandma used to sing to him. It was in Spanish and Dallas couldn't understand a word of it, but he liked the tune. It got stuck in his head for days at a time, and he'd find himself humming under his breath while he skated, the pattern of the melody matching the slap of his stick on the ice, the glide of his blades.

He wonders, randomly, if Vanessa ever sang that to Jayden, or if her grandmother still does. He wonders if the words in English are any less creepy than some of those kiddy rhymes he half-remembers:

_When the bell breaks_

_The cradle will fall_

_And down will come baby _

_Cradle and all_

_Ashes, ashes_

_We all fall down_

He bangs his head against the wall, cursing under his breath when the pain radiates through his skull. Why is he even thinking about

_(black blood on the concrete –)_

this?

Vanessa tiptoes out of the room, quietly shutting the door behind her. Then she leans against it, taking a deep breath and closing her eyes.

"Thought he'd wake up the whole building," he says.

He's surprised when she doesn't snap back, just puts a hand on her forehead.

"I used to get so jealous," she murmurs. "When he was little, and he'd only go to sleep with you. No matter what I did, when you took him, he'd always calm down."

He shuffles his feet, looks at the nondescript carpet on the floor. Doesn't remember anything like that; what little memories he has of Jayden as an infant are flashes –fussing on a blanket, the crackling sound of wailing through a plastic baby monitor, a hand tiny enough to wrap around his entire finger, not letting him go. The smell of milk and powder, the damp weight of a tiny body on his shoulder.

"Almost forgot," she says, and he stops remembering right there.

Vanessa holds out a handful of papers at him. He hesitates before taking them. So, these are what everything is about.

So…anti-climactic.

Just a handful of pieces of paper, and that's all there is to him, her, Jayden. Years of past, memory, emotion. All boiled down to a few sentences.

He skims the paper, his eyes jumping over the legal jargon to what he can understand.

_The adoption arrangement is as follows, outlined and agreed-upon by both parties: _

_The biological parents of the minor child, Jayden Michael Vargas, agree to relinquish all parental and custodial rights to the child's adoptive parents, Hector and Alissa R. Vargas. _

_The biological mother, Vanessa Lara Vargas, and the biological father, Michael James Dallas, both agree wholeheartedly to this arrangement_

_And also submit to the adoptive parents re-filing the child's birth certificate so as to be in their own name. _

_The child's biological parents understand that they will have limited visitation rights, to be discussed and agreed upon by the wishes of the adoptive parents_

Dallas folds the papers, leans his head against the wall. His head suddenly aches, and not from listening to Jayden howl through the walls.

"So," he says. "This is it?"

She nods. "You sign where the yellow checks are. Then I sign, then that's that."

He lets out a slow breath. "Then that's that," he repeats.

Vanessa is rubbing her temples, hunched over towards the ground.

"You don't really want to give him to your aunt and uncle," he murmurs.

He stares at the blank wall across from them, but can still feel her tense beside him. "Do you?"

She looks at him, eyes wide. For once, there's nothing angry or bitter there.

"It's not about me," she says quietly. "It's about him. He needs this more than I need it."

He looks down at the papers in his hand.

"You sound like you're trying to convince yourself of that," he says.

Her head snaps up. This time, her eyes are hard, their entire relationship flooding back into them.

"I already have," she says. "You think it's easy?" She shakes her head. "You don't get it. You couldn't. Not all of us can get up and walk away when things get hard."

His hands grip around the papers, crumpling them in his palms.

"See, the way I remember it," he drawls, feeling his voice turn mean, "you were the one who walked away first."

Her jaw clenches. He watches her straighten up, drawing to her full height, arms crossed over her chest as she glares at him.

"You knew about him before that," she shoots back. "You heard what was going on when you left town. Mr. Big-Shot, All Star Captain, couldn't even pick up the phone and call his own girlfriend."

"Ex," he replies. "And I broke up with you before any of that talk happened."

"But you still knew," she argues. "You _knew, _and you still took off." She steps closer to him. "Don't you dare turn this on me when you knew you were running away!"

He looks at her carefully, measuring every word he's about to say.

"I knew about Alex," he says slowly. "I was AT that party."

When her face darkens, he takes a step closer, until they're practically nose-to-nose. "And I'm the player here?"

Her face bypasses red and goes straight to practically purple.

"You know he's yours," she spits back. "You've always known. So don't you sit there and fucking pass an excuse on me because you're a worthless excuse for a father!"

He stares at her, and her face falls, like she might actually regret what she just said. He frowns, then gives her a cold smile. Without a word, he turns his back and walks away, the papers clutched in his tight grip, leaving her behind.

**XI.**

"Is this where you live?" Maya asks, as Skye pulls into the overgrown yard of a small blue house that looks like it's one snow clump away from sliding off the edge of the uneven sidewalk.

He shakes his head. "Nah. Just some buddies of mine. I said I'd stop by here. Have something for them." He looks at her. "You wanna come in? I'll just be a second."

She climbs out. It's too cold to sit in the car, anyway.

She follows Skye up a broken front porch, and when they go through the screen door she nearly crashes into a ping-pong table shoved right in the living room. It's impossibly dark inside, no windows except in the very back, hanging over the sink in a dingy, tiled kitchen. She keeps her hand skimming against the tabletop, following Skye through the shadowy house that smells like dust and sour milk.

There's music coming from a room in the back, and when Skye opens the door she sees a circle of kids their own age, red-eyed and laughing. A powerful smell of dirty, bitter earth scorches her nostrils, and she coughs when the scent burns the back of her throat.

"Skye!" A ratty-haired blonde girl in sweatpants gestures to them from the floor. She narrows her eyes when she sees Maya trailing behind. "Who's the schoolgirl?"

"Schoolgirl has a name," Maya says, frowning. "It's Maya."

The girl cracks a smile. "Whatever. No need to bite my head off." She looks at Skye. "Did you bring it?"

He nods, pulling a bag out of his pocket. "Just picked up."

When Maya catches a glimpse of the bag he passes to the girl, her eyes widen. "Is that…"

Skye looks over at her.

"Is that weed?" she finishes.

The blonde girl giggles. "Wow, what an AWESOME observation, Schoolgirl!"

Maya glances sharply at him. "You didn't tell me you had weed in the car. What would have happened if someone had pulled us over?"

"But no one did," Skye says, his voice drawing into a sulk. "And what does it matter to you, anyway? You like a narc?"

The blonde girl examines the bag. "Looks good," she approves. "Want to get going?"

"Doesn't look like she wants to," Skye says, shooting Maya a look.

Maya's ears turn red. Skye looks pissed, and if she makes him leave now it's officially the end of hanging out. Besides, why should she be stuck with Goody Goody Maya for the rest of her high school time? Hadn't she said the other night she'd stopped being that person?

"What…what does it feel like?" she asks, watching the blonde girl.

"What," Skye asks. "Being stoned?"

The blonde hears her, and laughs. "Aww, you're so cute! Skye, you really know how to pick 'em!"

"Shut up, Talia," he says.

She laughs again, shaking her head.

"How about this, Schoolgirl," Talia says to her. "I'll pack enough to give you a couple of hits, and then you can tell me how it feels."

Skye turns to Maya. "You don't have to do this if you don't want to," he says. "Swear. Not doing all peer-pressure crap."

"No," he says. She looks at Skye, then nods to Talia. "No, it's okay. I want to."

Talia smiles, motioning for her to sit next to her. "All right, Schoolgirl. Lesson Number One you'll learn today, how to pack a bowl."

She watches Talia, her head hurting from the fumes in the cramped little room. The others around her seem oblivious to it as they pass the little glass pipe around.

When it comes to Talia, she holds the little pipe for Maya, then gestures to the end. "Right here," she says, "and suck when I say so. Hold it in a few seconds, then let it out. Real slow."

Maya waits for Talia to nod to her, then goes for it. It burns more than she realized it would, and she bursts into a coughing jag that seems to tear her throat apart like someone's rubbing it with sand paper. She doubles over, nearly gagging, trying to breathe normally.

"That was…" she sputters, when she can talk.

Talia smiles. "Aww, no worries. It's your first one. Practice makes perfect!"

Across the circle, Skye is smirking. She looks away, embarrassed.

One guy who looks way too old to be hanging out with a bunch of high school kids smiles at her.

"So," the other guy drawls. "Maya." He takes a lazy hit and grins at her. "What's your story?"

She watches the smoke curl out of his mouth when he blows, the plumes it makes in the air.

"My boyfriend killed himself," she says. Her voice sounds foreign, even to her own ears.

The guy's eyes widen, and he dissolves into a coughing fit.

"Shit, man," he wheezes in between coughs. "Shit. That's really fucked up."

Maya nods. She watches the smoke dissolve into nothing, floating and disappearing into the shadows.

"He didn't say goodbye," she adds, her voice sounding like it's coming from the opposite end of a very long tunnel.

The other guy stops coughing, ending with a slow wheeze.

"Shit," he repeats. "Man, that's some messed up shit right there."

A few others nod their heads. Beside her, Talia takes another hit.

"Everyone treats me like I'm crazy." Maya shakes her head. "Or ignores me. I don't need anyone to baby me. I didn't lose my mind."

"They prob'ly don't know what to say to you, you know?" Talia says as she passes to Maya. "Don't know what you're thinking about it."

Maya shrugs. She takes the pipe and places it to her lips, sucking in like she hopes she's copied off of Talia.

Coughing Guy whistles.

"Damn," he says. "You have some good lungs, girl. I never saw someone go for it like you."

Maya can't help flushing with pride, but when she tries to smile she doubles over coughing once more, her lungs scorched dry with that burning smell of harsh, bitter earth.

"Thanks," she gasps, in between coughs that seem to crack her chest in two. "I guess that makes me a natural."

Talia slaps her on the back, giggling. "Hear that, Skye?" she says. "I like this one!"

Skye takes his own hit, and when he exhales his lips peel back into an effortless smile, revealing all his teeth.

"I like her, too," he says, winking at Maya.

She knows she's blushing; she covers her mouth to stop coughing, but instead finds herself doubling into giggles that can't seem to stop. The wracking pain in her chest eases, and instead gets replaced with laughter like bubbles. Bubbling up like lava, lightning, flames. She feels like a shaken-up soda can.

Cough Guy smiles. "You feel it yet?"

Maya shrugs. "I don't know." She smiles. "I don't feel anything."

Talia grabs her face in her hands, pulling their faces together.

"Hey!" Maya yelps.

Talia releases her. "Yep," she says with a satisfied nod to the rest of the group. "Definitely stoned."

Maya shakes her head. How is that even possible? She doesn't feel any different. Not really. Her eyes sting, sort of, but that's probably from all the smoke.

"I don't," she says firmly, shaking her head. "I don't feel anything."

Everyone around the circle just laughs. Maya wonders if they're laughing at her, but they just seem to be laughing for the hell of laughing, and she finds herself going along with it. It feels good, it feels really, really good, like nothing she's felt in a long time. The back of her throat still tickles from the burn of her hits, but she doesn't care much, just likes the feeling of this laughing, this loosening, like something she didn't know was knotted is starting to unravel at her feet. The more she laughs, the more the feeling in her chest loosens, and the less she cares that she doesn't know why everyone is still laughing.

Instead, she watches the smoke. It curls around her head like silk, like lacy silky frilly lilly giggly pretty, so pretty, and smooth, and foggy.

When she lays down on the floor, she can see the one grimy window in the kitchen. She hadn't realized that the house got darker, the daylight gone away. It's so late the sky's falling asleep. The moon gave up; the stars turned in.

She closes her eyes. No pictures behind them; no shorted constellations, no far-flung galaxies, no stars crashed down to earth.

**XII.**

One thing about Luke that Dallas can always count on – he does what you ask, and doesn't ask questions. So when Dallas sees his car pull up in front of Vanessa's hotel, he climbs in, and Luke just drives away without an interrogation as to why he had to pick him up at a hotel all the way downtown.

"You doing anything?" Luke asks, as they head down the freeway.

Dallas shakes his head. "Why?"

"There's supposed to be something going on tonight around here. Thought I'd check it out. You up for it?"

He shrugs. After Vanessa, anything to get the taste of their fight out of his mouth sounds like a plan. "I'm up for it."

Luke ends up taking them to a dark little house that looks inches away from collapsing on the sidewalk. The yard is overgrown almost to his knees, the driveway nothing more than a few ruts in the weeds. The paint on the walls is a peeling, washed-out grey, though maybe it was once blue, and the windows are covered in grime so thick he can't see through them, although he can see the light pulsing against the dirty glass from the inside. When he and Luke head up the front porch steps, Luke nearly falls through one of them, and has to grab onto the rusted railing to keep from hitting the ground.

Inside, the smell of weed and body odor almost makes him gag; a sea of bodies are packed so tightly together that he can barely distinguish one from the other. There's music blaring from a stereo somewhere in the back of the house, the bass thudding through him like a pulse. He follows the bob of Luke's Ice Hounds jacket through the crowd, trying not to get lost in the tangle of limbs and sweat.

Luke grabs a cup of beer from a flimsy plastic table shoved in the corner. He hands Dallas one of his own, and he tips it back, but before he takes a sip, he stops short.

Eli Goldsworthy is standing at the table, filling up his own cup.

When he sees Dallas, he doesn't say anything, but looks at him long enough to raise his cup towards him, then turn away to talk to a skinny blonde chick in sweatpants that is most assuredly not-Clare Edwards.

Okay. So Dallas can guess who Eli was hiding from in the theatre earlier today.

The girl pulls closer, whispering into his ear, and Eli smiles. Then the girl reaches into her pocket, and presses something in his palm with a wink. Eli takes it, and after a minute slips it into the pocket of his black jeans.

Dallas looks away, surprised. He never knew Eli was into this kind of stuff.

When he turns back to where Luke was standing, he's not there anymore, and Dallas curses under his breath. He just wants to go home all of a sudden. Sighing, he downs his beer in one gulp, and looks around the room, hoping to spot that telltale red jacket. Maybe he can drag Luke out of here.

He turns, and almost drops the cup he's holding.

Katie Matlin's little sister is standing at his side.

She looks up at him, eyes completely bloodshot, and when she smiles the expression seems to float off her face.

"Could you move?" she demands.

He stares at her for a moment. "Never thought you were one for parties," he says.

She grabs a cup of her own, taking a sip. "I'm here to have fun!"

"You look like it," he says.

Her face doesn't lose that floating smile.

"So I'm guessing your sister doesn't know you're here," he says, glancing around and already knowing he won't see Katie.

"Nooooope." She giggles. "I'm flyin' solo!" She claps her hands and suddenly laughs. "Like the song! You know?"

She laughs again, her hands waving in the air like she's dancing to some music he can't hear. The nerdy girl he recognizes from the hallways is gone; this kid is wearing that girl's glasses and has the same skinny figure, but nothing else is the same.

The Pod Person Matlin frowns when she sees him staring, sticking her lips out in a way that reminds him of Jayden a little too much.

"Don't stare," she whines. "It's rude."

He can smell whatever it is she's downed on her breath, as well as the earthy tint of weed on her clothes.

Before he can say anything to her, someone grabs her arm. Another kid he recognizes from school, though he doesn't know his name. Cheap liquor and sweat ooze off of him in waves, and his eyes are huge and dilated, unfocused. Dallas doesn't know what he's on, but he doesn't like the manic dart in the kid's eyes, how they never quite focus on one place. He wonders if it's the same thing the girl in the sweatpants gave Eli. He looks quickly at Katie's sister, trying to see if her eyes are doing the same, but she just looks really stoned.

"Come on," he says, tugging her wrist. "We're taking shots."

Katie's sister looks back at Dallas. "Gotta go!" she chirps, her voice slurring just a bit. She nearly trips over her own feet following the boy into the kitchen, where a ton of kids are cramped around a dirty table covered in shot glasses and empty bottles. Luke is one of them.

Dallas watches her go, rooted in place until he loses sight of her. Until her tangled blonde hair disappears into the mess of bodies, and the bobbing head becomes another part of the crowd. Until he can't hear the hiccupped hitch of her voice over the pound of the music thudding through the room like it's about to blast these paper-thin walls apart.


	7. Chapter 7

**Author's Note: Thanks to everyone who continues to read & support this fic. **

**Also, a little fun fact – the opening section of this chapter is the first thing I ever wrote for this story.**

**Twitter: AlbatrossTam14 (protected tweets)**

**Tumblr: welldeservedobscurity**

**I don't own Degrassi.**

**I.**

The brightness of the flowers looks like a thousand glowing, rapturous faces; the smell of peace coming off of them makes his head hurt. The whole place looks like it belongs in a sunbeam. It's like it doesn't care about what's happened. Or worse, it's has already moved on.

Jake is the first person to see him, and looks up from a sprawling tomato plant to stare him down.

"Get out," he says.

Dallas raises an eyebrow. "Public place. I can stay if I want."

Jake steps closer toward him, the spade gripped in white knuckles.

"I don't care if it's a public place," he says. "Get. Out."

Dallas takes a step towards him, but Jake doesn't flinch. They stare each other down for a moment before another voice comes between them.

"What the hell do you want?"

Katie puts one hand on Jake's chest, glaring at Dallas.

His eyes slide smoothly from Jake's cold fury to hers. "Need to talk to you."

"Sorry." She says it like she's spitting at his feet. "Not in the mood."

He shrugs. "I can wait."

"You have some kind of nerve, Dallas," Jake cuts in. "You know that?"

He looks at him evenly. "I don't really care. I need to talk to Dragon Tattoo. Now."

Katie looks at Jake, then back to Dallas. Then she walks out of the garden, and he follows.

"He's right, you know," Katie hisses, when they reach an empty corner. "You do have some nerve to just waltz in there like that."

"If you're gonna start accusing me again of wrecking your precious garden again, save it," he says. "I need to talk to you about your sister."

Katie couldn't look more surprised. "Why?"

"I saw her," Dallas says. "The other night. At a party in Longview. She was hanging out with some kid, and looked like she was doing more than just having a good time."

Katie rolls her eyes. "Okay, have you met Maya?"

"I thought I had," Dallas says. "Until the other night."

When Katie frowns, he replies, "I saw this chick from Degrassi at that party. She's known for being everyone's hook-up. She had ecstasy on her that night. I know your sister's new boyfriend was on something serious. I don't know about your sister, though."

Katie stares at him for a long moment, then shakes her head.

"No," she says. "No, no. You sound completely ridiculous, you know that? Okay? My sister does not DO ecstasy. My sister does not go to parties. My sister stays at home and plays her cello and still sleeps with a stuffed owl she got when she was eight!" She throws her hands in the air. "She doesn't…do drugs and hook up with random jerks!"

Dallas sighs.

"Look," he says. "I don't know how you think she's dealing with…everything," he swallows down a lump in his throat, "but the girl I saw at the party looked messed up. In more ways than one."

Dallas pulls his phone out of his pocket and brings up Facerange, pointing to a video posted late last night.

"Just watch," he says quietly, pressing PLAY.

Katie folds her arms over her chest as she watches the video. Her sister, sitting on the soiled couch at the party. The guy she was with, his lips attached to hers. His hands scratching and grabbing at her breasts, crawling under her shirt. The two of them surrounded by bottles of Vodka and Gatorade as they continued to make out amidst the people screaming "CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!" and couples grinding to the blasting bass.

She stares down at the tile floor, biting her lip, and when she looks at him Dallas wonders if she might cry.

"Why do you care?" she whispers finally.

He shrugs.

"I figured," he tells her, "that after everything she's had to deal with, that more people talking behind her back is the last thing she needs." He leans in closer to her. "I also think you should set her straight real fast. Before something else happens."

Katie grips her arms more tightly around herself.

"I'll do that," she whispers, and he thinks he sees her blink back tears.

Katie turns away from him, heading back towards Jake, who has been watching their whole conversation from the tomato patch with a scowl darkening his face.

Before she goes back to him, she turns around, hesitating a moment.

"Thanks, Dallas," she murmurs, then turns toward the sun and flees.

**II.**

"We need to talk. Right. Now."

Maya looks up from her notebook to see Tris and Tori hovering over her.

"Can this wait?" she says. "I have a history test second period."

Tristan frowns. "This is more important than any history test, Maya Matlin."

"Were you at that party everyone's talking about Friday night?" Tori says breathlessly.

Maya stares at her for a moment. "Why does it matter to you?"

"Just answer the question," Tristan snaps.

She glares at him. "Why?"

Tristan and Tori exchange that LOOK that they have, the one that sets her teeth on edge lately.

"We heard some rumors," Tori says. "About some stuff that happened at a party over the weekend."

Tristan cuts her off. "How ecstasy was being passed around at the party. And how your oh-so-not-awesome little boy toy managed to snag himself some."

Her jaw drops open. "Skye was on ecstasy?"

Tristan crosses his arms over his chest. "What, like you didn't know?"

When Maya still stares at him, jaw hanging down, Tori says, "You really don't know?"

She shakes her head. "He wasn't ACTING like he was on drugs. I just thought…I thought he was having a good time."

Tristan snorts. "Some 'good time'."

Maya frowns. "You said it yourself – you weren't there, it's just a rumor. I could say that I took ecstasy."

When Tori jumps and the color drains from her face, Maya rolls her eyes. "Which I didn't do," she adds.

"And you're sure he wasn't on drugs?" Tori asks.

"Maya's hardly an expert," Tristan says.

Maya glares at him. "Shut up, Tris. You weren't there, and you don't know Skye."

"Then why is there a video of you two making out if he's such a great guy?" Tristan argues.

Maya blinks. "What?"

Tristan pulls out his iPhone and pulls up a video posted on someone's Facerange wall. "This was from the party the other night," he says. "So tell me, isn't that you and your Handsome Prince?"

It is, all right. And they're surrounded by plastic cups filled with the vodka and Gatorade they'd been drinking. Maya remembers looking at herself in the mirror that morning, the bruises he made on her chest; the feel of his warm, slippery fingers groping for her breasts, pulling at the fabric of her t-shirt, clawing at the skin under her bra, leaving marks that she could see when she got out of the shower this morning – long red scratches, like some animal had slashed her. The hard tang of his mouth when it slid over hers, like ash and melted sugar. How it made her feel like her head was about to spin right off; though maybe that had been more of from weed she'd smoked than Skye making out with her.

She makes her face impassive. "So? That proves nothing except we made out. And that's not illegal."

Tori's face falls. "Don't you care what people are going to say?"

"Why should I?" She rolls her eyes. "I'm allowed to kiss other guys, Tori."

"What about Cam?" Tristan asks.

Tori freezes. "Tris," she murmurs.

Maya holds his gaze for a long moment.

"You're SO right," she says. "I should think about Cam. In fact, I should let him know about this! He might get the wrong idea!

When neither of them respond, she rolls her eyes. "You guys really need to get a life," she says. "Skye isn't using me, and I'm not using him. We're just having fun. And I'm gonna keep having fun with him for as long as I want."

She turns and walks away, but not before Tori shouts, "We're just trying to look out for you. This isn't you, Maya! None of it is."

She whirls around.

"Who says it isn't me?" she demands. "Does everyone want be to me some crazy widow, crying her eyes out all the time and lighting candles? Does everyone still think I'm gonna go kill myself if someone says Cam's name?" When Tristan and Tori both wince, she throws her arms up in the air. "I am so SICK of everyone telling me who I'm supposed to be!"

Before either of them can say anything else, she spins on her heels and runs into the school, ignoring Tori yelling behind her. She runs through the hallway past people staring – for what, she can only imagine, now that this video's out – and heads towards the first empty hall she can find, near the principal's office.

She slows her pace when she realizes no one's following her, then takes a minute to catch her breath.

So Skye had been on drugs. Maybe. Had he? She didn't know. She didn't know what it looked like, except when Katie had been on pills. And Skye hadn't acted like her – crazy-hyper one minute, then completely out of it and weird, then crashing down and acting like someone was pulling her into a black hole. He hadn't been like that. He'd been…more or less how he always was.

_You were drunk,_ the voice in her head reminds her. _And you'd been smoking. You could have missed it._

She shakes her head. What does it matter, really. So he was on drugs. She was drunk and stoned. It's not like she was in a place to tell him anything.

Besides, she had a good time. For the first time in…ages.

Out of the corner of her eye, she catches a flash of glass. The Ice Hounds memorial display case. She remembers that Mike Dallas broke the first glass case covering it; he'd thrown a trash can at it, That Day. Maya had come around the corner, just out of Simpson's office – he'd just told her – and she'd seen him.

He'd been crying, hard. A metal trashcan rolled down the hallway, like a lonely soul, and the glass to the shattered display window lay broken and smashes on the grody tile floor, bleeding radiance. A thousand glittering suns and microscopic chunks of starlight, scattered into a world that now seemed devoid of anything but night.

Her hands shaking, she whips her phone out of her pocket. Her fingers are so slippery that she can barely type her message to Skye:

_Hey u bored? Lets do something. I don't feel like going 2 French_

She leans back against the wall, trying to catch her breath. Trying to forget that –

_Nobody was there to fall asleep next to Him. No head on His chest, hands entwined like secrets. No one was there to kiss His cheek, whisper in His ear, sing to Him until He drifted off. No one held Him as He dissolved into steam, no one helped Him to sew the broken boy pieces back together, wash them in warm water, wrap them in a fluffy towel and make them into a REAL PERSON again, because He didn't want to be a real person, He wanted to shatter, to break, to sprawl on the concrete like the glass from the broken display case, light up the whole worlds with his shards, His destroyed pieces, He wanted to be broken on the outside because He already was on the in –_

Her phone vibrates, and she almost jumps out of her skin. Her heart racing, she taps the screen with trembling hands, nearly dropping her phone on the ground:

_Meet me at the baseball dugout. 5 min ;)_

Maya stares at the message, stares until her vision clears and she doesn't feel moisture prickling at the corners of her eyes, threatening to spill down her cheeks. She leans against the wall, heart still pounding, and tries to breathe. It wasn't always this hard. In and out, in and out, in and out, easy, easy, used to be easy.

**III.**

He has history next period, but fuck it. He's done with history. Sick of war and death and suffering. He's living through enough history at the moment.

He waits until he can't see any teachers in the hallways, then slips into the empty theatre. Again, he can hear his footsteps echoing in the dark, and he climbs up on the edge of the stage, laying on his back as he stares at the rows of stage lights hanging above him.

There are footsteps behind him.

Dallas bolts up, and Clare Edwards freezes. She's standing in the stage wing, slightly out of breath, and her face is streaked with tears.

Clare looks up at him, her face swollen and botched.

"Oh, great," she mumbles into her denim jacket. "As if this day couldn't get any better."

Dallas hesitates. "Sorry," he mumbles. "Not happy to see me, I take it."

Clare lets out a wet, deep laugh that turns into a sob midway.

"The last time we 'talked'," she sniffles, wiping her face on her sleeve, "you got me drunk and kissed me. Then you and your team showed up and trashed my birthday party. So, yeah – count me unbelievably unthrilled to see you here."

Dallas shuffles again.

"I'll go," he mumbles.

He jumps off the stage, heading down the aisle, when he hears Clare again, her voice so quiet be barely hears it.

"How do you sleep at night?"

He turns back to her, his stomach turning. Clare is still huddled in the corner, half-hidden behind the curtain. She stares at the ground, and when she looks back up at him, her eyes are dry.

"You were there," she says, not looking at him. "You saw it. How do you just…keep going on, like it's normal?"

Dallas swallows, trying to breathe. It comes out a shallow wheeze.

"I keep seeing it," she whispers. "Him. That day…"

She shakes her head, sweaty hair plastered to her face. "And all that blood…" She hiccups on the word. "How do you just get over that?"

He leans against the edge of the stage, burying his head in his arms. He's never wished so badly to be drunk. He can practically taste the whiskey going down his throat, the soft, warm burn in the pit of his stomach.

"I don't know," he mutters. "I don't –"

He almost repeats it, but just leaves the statement hanging.

Clare's arms cross over her chest; she takes a few deep breaths, hugging herself together, and stares at the masking tape marking the dusty stage, leftovers from Eli's play.

"What are you doing here?" she asks finally.

Dallas shrugs. "Free country. Anyone's welcome to cut Perino's class in here."

Clare rolls her eyes. "And here I thought I'd enjoy a peaceful lunch."

"No offense," Dallas says, "but you don't look so peaceful."

She frowns. "No offense," she parrots, "but I don't need you pretending to care about my well-being again."

"Who says I'm pretending?"

Clare doesn't blink. "What, no beer this time?"

He really could use a drink now that she mentions it, but doesn't say anything.

"You're still pissed," he murmurs. "I get that. Still doesn't change that you look miserable."

Clare makes a noise under her breath. She stands in the shadows again, wiping her face dry, then folds her arms and stares back down at the marked ground.

"Eli took drugs at a party," she says. She nudges a loose piece of white tape with the toe of her boot. "Then he called me and dumped me. He said he was sick of being around me, that he couldn't deal with me needing to talk all the time."

Dallas's eyes slide out to the empty crowd. "Sucks," he mumbles. "Sorry."

She sniffs again, biting her lip so hard Dallas is surprised it doesn't bleed.

"I know it's about Cam," she says, "but he won't talk to me about it."

"He probably doesn't know what to say."

"And I do?" Clare argues.

Dallas looks at her. She's gripping her arms so tightly her knuckles are white.

"I know Eli doesn't want to talk about it," she says. "I don't either. But I can't just pretend like nothing happened! I need to talk about it! And it's probably selfish, but I don't care. I need Eli to talk to me!"

She stifles a sob, biting the inside of her cheek to keep the tears from coming. "Because I _need_ him to. I saw Cam! I watched it happen, too! We both watched him die!"

Dallas has to shut his eyes, wishes he could shut his ears. But that doesn't stop the

_(black blood on the concrete – )_

memories from rushing back, almost as clearly as they felt That Day.

"I needed…" she takes another breath, trying to clear her throat, "I thought we could get through it together." She sniffles loudly, shaking her head. "But nothing makes it better."

She turns to him, her eyes glittering. "Does it?".

He doesn't answer. Throat welled shut, he turns away, staring out at the empty auditorium. Funny how this room looks so much smaller when there's nobody else in here. The empty seats stare back at him, almost taunting.

"You never told me," Clare says, after they've been silent for a long time. Her voice is thick. "How you sleep at night."

He turns to her. "Who says I sleep."

They hold each other's gazes.

"I see it," she says. She grits her teeth, her jaw clenched. "Every single night, I see it. He's falling, and I'm just…standing. Right there. And I'm _screaming_, but there's no sound coming out. And when he hits the ground, I'm still screaming. There's _so _much blood…"

She closes her eyes, makes a noise like she's being strangled. When she opens them, tears pour down her face.

"And then I wake up," she whispers. "And I'm still screaming."

**IV.**

It doesn't surprise Maya that Katie bangs on her bedroom door the second she gets home from school.

Her sister barges her way in without greeting, then shoves her phone in Maya's face.

"Care to explain this?" she demands.

It's the video from Friday night Tori showed her. Maya keeps her face blank.

"Yeah," she says. "I took your skirt. Sorry."

She looks back down at her homework spread out on her duvet, but Katie grabs her chin, yanking her face back up.

Maya jerks away from her sister's grip. "Hey!"

"Don't even try and shit me," Katie growls, grabbing her face again and pulling it closer to hers.

"What were you on?" she demands. "What did you take?"

When Maya doesn't answer, Katie yells, "I'M TALKING TO YOU!"

Maya shoves her. "Get off me, psycho! God, you're a freak!"

"What did he give you?" Katie shouts.

"NOTHING!" Maya screams in Katie's ear, making her sister let go of her.

"I wasn't on drugs," she mutters. "What's wrong with you?"

"What's wrong with _me?"_ Katie says. "I'm not the one partying with a random when I'm clearly messed up on something."

Maya snorts. "Not this month, you're not."

Katie's hand comes up so fast and across her skin that Maya doesn't feel the impact until her face is starting to ache.

For a moment, neither of them can speak. Katie bites her lip, her face turning red, and Maya's palm rests on her stinging face.

"Did you miss the months I was in rehab?" Katie finally hisses. "Did you forget I almost _died?"_

Maya rolls her eyes. "Wow, Katie. Way to make it all about you. _Again_."

"This has nothing to do with me!" Katie says. "Do you KNOW what people are going to say about you? What they're already saying?"

This is the most direct her sister has been with her since before Cam died. For weeks now, it's like Katie's been afraid to talk to her; like she's some Martian Maya in a Real Maya skin suit.

"You know who I heard about this from?" Katie continues. "Mike Dallas. Out of all the people in the world, I had to hear it from him." She puts her hands on her hips. "How do you think that makes me feel?"

Maya rolls her eyes. "I don't give a shit how you feel!"

Her sister recoils. "Maya!"

Maya takes the phone out of Katie's hands.

"Looks like people think it's 'sexy'," she smirks, reading one of the comments. "And hey, it got shared on four other Facerange walls."

"You look like a skank," Katie says. "I really _should_ start calling you Maya DeSousa. This could destroy you, Maya, do you have any idea how much you hurt yourself with this? The rest of Degrassi will never let you forget about this."

"Oh, please," Maya says. "Like they won't forget all about this by next week."

"No, they won't!" Katie says. "It's out there, Maya; it doesn't matter who forgets about it or who doesn't. It's already on the internet, and people have already seen it! You know how badly something like this could mess up your life? This has NEVER been you, Maya, this kissing random jerks and going to parties and drinking? The video hasn't even been up for a day and the only thing I'm hearing is all sorts of stuff about you and this guy."

"I could say the same thing for you and Jake," Maya says smoothly. "Take any showers lately?"

Katie's face bypasses red and goes straight to purple. "What I do with my boyfriend is none of your business!"

"And what I do with mine is none of yours!"

Katie snorts. "Skye isn't your boyfriend; he's a burnout leach who's using you!"

"You don't know him!"

"I know he's the kind of jerk who does THIS to you!" Katie says, shoving the video back in Maya's face. "He's not a good guy, Maya. You can't just ignore that. You can't replace Cam!"

"Why not?" Maya demands.

When Katie's mouth falls open, Maya jumps off the bed.

"I am so SICK of everyone talking about _stupid_ Cam and his _stupid_ killing himself and how we should all feel SOOOOO bad! Guess what? I don't! I don't fucking CARE about Cam; he's dead, and I'm getting on with my life!"

She storms out of the bedroom, Katie on her heels.

"Maya!" She calls. "Maya! I know you don't mean that."

Maya turns around and glares at her.

"I know you're angry," Katie says. "And upset. I know you loved Cam; like he loved you."

"Cam's DEAD!" Maya yells. The words echo through the entire empty house. Katie freezes. "I don't give a shit about him! He obviously didn't care about me, either, if he could kill himself! You don't do that if you love someone!"

Katie's face softens, her eyes sad.

"He was sick, Maya," she whispers. "Really, really sick."

Maya scoffs. "Well, too bad. He never tried to get better."

She turns on her heels and runs back to her room, slamming the door in her sister's face, breathing hard. After a moment, Maya kicks the door, and waits until she can hear Katie walking away.

When she's sure Katie's gone, Maya snatches her phone out of her backpack. Her hands are shaking so hard she nearly drops the phone.

_Think youll be up for some fun later?_

After a moment, the phone lights up in her hand.

_Yah sounds good lol. Party 2nite?_

Maya grins. Her fingers fly across the keyboard.

_Sounds great!_

She slides the phone back into her backpack, blocking out Katie's words. Fuck it, she thinks. Let everyone talk. They can go fake-cry for poor dead Cam somewhere else.

Like they ever knew him at all; like they ever would have cared about him if he were still alive; like they knew who he was, outside of "hockey superstar" or "suicide kid".

_Fuck it._

She rolls the words around inside her head, tasting the harshness, the way they burn her mouth when it shapes around them. It's not different from the earthy joint she pressed between her lips, or the cold glass of the bong, or the slip of vodka and sickly-sweet Gatorade scratching her throat on the way down. The way Skye's mouth felt, the shape of his tongue tangled with hers, the ashy taste of him.

_Fuck her. _

_Fuck everyone._

_Fuck it all._

_(Like they have ANY idea how this really feels.)_


	8. Chapter 8

**Author's Note: Look what finally got updated! And it just happens to be the climax chapter! **

***waves pom-poms in your face; does a little dance, makes a little love, gets down tonight***

**I know this sounds completely redundant at this point, but thanks again to anyone who supports this fic. I normally don't write long ones because I find it really, really, REALLY difficult, but I'm proud to have stuck with this, and I love anyone who reads and reviews. **

**I.**

The bass is pounding, pounding, pounding, and Maya's head and heart along with it. She stumbles through the door of the little blue house, almost crashing once again into that stupid Ping-Pong table shoved right in the main room, and then almost trips over two guys playing beer pong. _Fuck,_ one of them curses, and _watch it _another one says, but she barely registers the voices as she trips into Skye, clutching his arm as he leads her further into the melee.

The stereo wails and beats, screeches and howls, wails and crashes and echoes. She can't tell where the noise is coming from, but around her, people eat and scream, chug and grind, dance and smoke. She thinks the tune might be "Gangham Style", because she spots two of the kids she remembers smoking with the other night doing some of the moves, but with the amount of people yelling at each other over the unbearable belting of the music, she has no clue; it could just as easily be "My Heart Will Go On".

She's tugged along by Skye into the kitchen, where she nearly slips and busts her ass on a broken beer bottle that fizzed and foamed all over the grody tiles. She clings to Skye, who trips and steadies himself, mumbling "fuck" under his breath as he pushes her away to hold himself upward.

He turns around to look at her, and she tries to stay standing.

"Sorry," she mumbles.

The bass. The beat. Her head. It pounds, pounds, pounds.

The irritation slips off his face as he shrugs, unconcerned once again.

"Let's get something to drink," he says.

She nods, sort of. Her legs are shaking, but after a minute, she thinks, she'll be okay.

She and Skye did something called pre-gaming at his cousin's house before they came here – didn't know what it meant, but apparently it meant that you got drunk before you actually went to get drunk. Didn't seem to make much sense, but after a few beers she was just glad Skye let her tag along.

He doesn't seem to be bothered too much by the few Coors Light they had. Maya hadn't either at first, but now she thinks those shots of strawberry-kiwi vodka on top of those beers might have been a bad idea. It seemed like so little at the time – the glass was so cute, a tiny little thing that fit in the palm of her hand – and she darted two of them down, one after the other. It was sweet and burned like hell all the way down, and she nearly felt like puking, but Skye cheered her on and when she'd finally felt like she wouldn't upchuck, he patted her on the back and told her she was a real pro. Then she'd felt like skipping, better than she had in months.

But now, her legs don't like to stay underneath her, like they might leave her here and walk away.

Skye hands her a cup of something, and she takes a sip. It doesn't make her headache stop, but for a moment it stops her legs from shaking.

"Thanks," she says.

Skye doesn't hear her. He's busy watching a couple of kids gathered around the island in the middle of the kitchen.

"Wanna play Ring of Fire?" he says.

She has no idea what that is. "Huh?"

Skye shrugs. "Never mind. Look, I'm gonna hang with them, okay?"

He doesn't wait for her response, so she stands there in the middle of the kitchen, holding her cup and staring at the brown contents swirling inside it. She tosses back another few sips of it for good measure, just to look like she's doing something.

She ends up inching her way into the main room – it's packed and the music is loudest there, but it has a couch, and right now she needs a couch – and she pushes aside a couple making out so she can at least sit on the armrest.

The girl turns to her and scowls. "Fuck off!"

Maya blinks at her. "Sorry?"

The guy looks up at her and then back down the girl's shirt. "Just ignore her," he urges. "She's too fucking wasted."

"Then she needs to get out of here," the girl says, and arches her leg out as if to kick Maya. "Get lost!"

Maya stares at them, and when the girl shifts again, pushing her off the armrest. Maya gets up and nearly falls over in an attempt to get away. She hears the girl laughing at her, but then figures her boyfriend's mouth stopped the noise.

Maya peers into the kitchen, but can't see Skye anymore. She doesn't know him from the other people, doesn't know anyone else in the room.

_Can I go home?_ she thinks, bewildered. Maybe he'll take her home.

If she can find him.

She leans against the wall, trying to grab onto something and finding nothing to hold her. She leans against it instead of trying to hold on, which is good, because her legs don't want to stay where she is, they want to explore the party while she just wants to hide in the corner and _go home._

Her head hurts so badly, oh god, and the drums are pounding, heart keeps pounding, pounding away.

**II.**

He doesn't really feel much for a party, but Luke and the rest of the guys have been talking about this thing all week, and he figures that it's better to just go along with it than the alternative, which involves staying in with the Torreses and dealing with Audra awkwardly try to coax him into watching a movie with her, in an attempt to cheer him up.

Yeah, no.

As soon as he gets to the party, he half-wishes he'd just taken the night humoring Audra and eating her parmesan popcorn. The place reeks of sweat and cheap booze when they get there, and people are already so plastered they're puking over the porch railings and falling over themselves in the street.

When they get inside, he winces at the music, way too loud. He ducks his head slightly, following Luke into the kitchen where the drinks are mixing. The windows are streaked with grime and spider webs, the floor sticky with spilled beer and broken bottles, and there's something that's either cat shit or throw-up piled in a corner.

He pours himself a rum and coke, and when he looks up, Luke's playing what looks like Ring of Fire. Dallas watches, wondering if it's worth it to get drunk enough, when he spots the curly-haired afro of the kid from the other night.

Katie's sister's co-star from the video.

Dallas peers around the filthy kitchen, trying to catch a glimpse of the Mini Matlin. _Maybe she's not here,_ he thinks, but something tells him otherwise.

Whether she is or not, her new boy-toy doesn't seem too concerned. He's pretty hammered, Dallas can tell from here, and he's got his arm around Eli's drug hook-up girl from the other night's party. They're cheering something slurred and indistinguishable, over the thud of the bass that jackhammers through the entire little house like it's trying to blast it apart.

The floor underneath him shakes with every thud of the bass, and Dallas thinks, that shouldn't take too long.

He takes a sip of his drink, wincing at the awful sicky-sweetness of it. It fills his nose and burns all the way down, like swallowing rotting honey. Dallas doubles over and tries not to gag.

Around him, the house crumbles to the beat of the bass.

**III.**

Bass drums and a taste in her mouth like something died there. Maya keeps grasping for a hold on the wall, letting it lead her around the perimeter of the smoke-filled room.

_Skye_, she thinks. _Skye, in the kitchen. Get._

_I just wanna go home._

Her other hand clutches the cup of something – she isn't sure who gave it to her or what's in it, but she keeps holding onto it like it's going to help her stand. She takes another sip from whatever it is.

The heat and the music and the sweat and the smell of warm piss are all making her sick. The entire cramped room feels like it's shrinking in on her, the spinning walls coming together like puzzle pieces, amidst the uproar of stinking bodies coming and going.

She feels hot, so hot.

_Get to Skye kitchen._

Someone bumps against her side, knocking her into the wall. The guy giggles, not even looking over at her as he walks away, and he nearly falls over trying to regain his balance.

She still feels hot, but now she feels? Her shirt. It's got something splashed all over it.

She moves to unbutton it, but with the hand that's still holding her drink. It spills all down the front of her camisole and down her jeans. Maya watches as the stains start to spread, darkening her clothes.

The whole place stinks like beer and bad breath and smoke and the bass plays on, too loudly, and someone stands up in the middle of the room and yells out, and everyone else punches the air and yells with him, and even the girl who had pushed her earlier covers her ears and scowls against the raucous screams.

Maya puts her hands over her ears. The aching thud of the bass becomes a duller _whoosh_, and for the moment, her head hurts a little bit less. She crouches against the spot on the wall, ducking downward, and keeps her hands pressed over her ears, chin tucked to her sweaty, liquor-soaked chest.

The world whooshes and spins and stinks and roars, but she stays low to the ground, and squeezes the noise away.

**IV.**

Luke is making out with some blonde in booty shorts, her long spray-tanned legs wrapped around him. They stretch on the couch, his long fingers clawing at her breasts and her tongue doing most of the work.

Dallas turns away from them and tries to scan the room, wondering if Eli is here with his hook-up girl. He can't see him, but that doesn't mean he isn't hear – the place is cramped from floor to ceiling, wall to wall with bodies.

One body bumps against Dallas, splashing beer everywhere. Dallas scowls at him, and the guy staggers off, muttering "shit, shit…" in between giggles.

In the middle of the room, people are circling around the ping pong table, but beer pong seems to have transformed into something else, as they are now throwing the ping pong balls at each other and trying to catch them in the Solo cups. One guy who looks big enough to be an NFL linebacker body-slams to the table in an attempt to catch a flying ball, his cup in the air. Dallas watches the flimsy table buckle under the heavy guy's weight as the beer goes flying, and the entire thing collapses in a crash of metal and surprise.

People turn to look at the sound, and when they saw the mess of the broken table and the guy sitting dazed in the wreckage, they let out a cheer and pump their fists in the air. The people who surrounded the fallen table seems in no hurry to help the drunk guy up, so they stare and laugh instead. Some of them dump their cups of beer on the guy and he looks around, bewildered, like he doesn't understand where it's coming from.

Dallas takes another sip of his drink, then puts it aside on a table ringed with stains. The room seems to be getting darker – looks like someone switched off a light – and another bawdy cheer goes up from the crowd as they shake their fists into the shadows.

**V.**

It's dark, too dark, and the rush of the crowd turns up another notch. Maya still bends down towards the ground, gripping her ears tightly, but the pulse-pounding headache is back, and her heart feels like it's about to break out of her chest. It hurts, and she lets out a soft, teary whimper.

_I want to go home_, she thinks, tears squeezing out of her stinging, smoke-filled eyes. Crying only makes her stomach turn, though, so she tries to hold it back.

But her head aches harder when she does that, and the headache is worse than the stomachache, so she doubles over crying, clutching her ears and letting snot roll down her nose and onto her chin.

_I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go hoooomeeeee…._

There's a hand on her head, and a face suddenly bending down towards hers.

"Maya?"

All she sees is a pair of scuffed up sneakers, caked with mud and the laces torn almost to shreds. She can't stop staring at the shoes, but then a hand cups her chin and makes her look into the face above them, and Zig's bloodshot eyes and beet red face meets her own. He's holding a cup of something, but puts it aside and tries to grab her face to focus it on his.

"Maya? What are you doing here?"

Her mouth is too dry to respond.

_Your shoes_, she wants to say.

He's still holding her chin, and tries to pry her hands off her ears. The boom in the little space suddenly feels a thousand times louder, and close as if she's standing right in front of the speakers.

Fresh tears fall from her eyes.

_No,_ she tries to wail, attempting to bat his hands away. But she loses what balance she has and almost falls face-first into the floor. Zig catches her and pulls her upright, and her legs scream in agony from being crouched down for so long.

She thrashes against him. "It's too loud," she wails.

Zig hauls her into a corner, close to the bathroom. He holds her up against the wall, peering at her closely.

"Who did you come here with?" he asks. "How'd you get here?"

Maya shakes her head.

"Your shoes…"

His mouth presses into a thin line when he smells her breath.

"How much have you had to drink?" he asks. "Come on, let's get you water…"

He tries to take her hand, but she fights his hold, trying to arch away from him.

_I wanna go home. _"I wanna go home!"

Another sob escapes her, as does another train of tears and snot. Maya ducks her head down, but Zig takes the sleeve of his hoodie, and wipes her face clean with it.

"Hold on," he murmurs. He wipes the smoky tear tracks from her cheeks, the snot off her nose and chin, and wipes the stickiness out of her eyes. "Come here, I got it, it's okay."

As soon as the grossness is wiped up, he tries to hold her upright.

"Okay," he says. "Hold on, just…you really need to lie down and drink some water…"

Maya keeps shaking her head.

"I'm too loud," she cries, and her hands go back to her ears. A sob turns into a cough as she gasps in a mouthful of smoke and sugary sweat, and her throat burns. It's so hot, she feels like suffocating, can't breathe in anything but ash and dust. "Please, take me home?"

Her head's so heavy, too heavy for her useless neck. She slumps into the wall, and presses her forehead against it.

_Feels good_, she thinks, and it's a blessed relief that the harder she pushes against the cold solidness it, the less her head feels like it's going to explode.

Zig puts a hand on her cheek. He tries to turn her head towards her.

"Maya," he says. "Maya, hey. Hey! Maya. Look at me. Look at me!"

But it feels cool and dark against the wall, and her head doesn't ache so much. And the dark is so welcome, it's so restful and quiet and everything hurts so much less; she doesn't feel anything, not anymore.

_I wanna go home, _and she's finally stopped hurting, no more, no more, no more.

**VI.**

Dallas sees the shock of red before he sees anything else.

The corner by the bathroom has more light than the rest of the dim room, and there's fewer people standing away from the bulk of the action. There's the skinny niner that Dallas recognizes as Zig Novak, the guy Cam had cold-cocked. And he's holding someone up against the wall, someone with blonde hair and a filthy red shirt half-undone and head turned to the side as her glasses hang off her face, smudged and crooked.

The kid's shaking the fuck out of her, his mouth moving, shouts Dallas can't hear. But he knows panic when he sees it, and the way the kid's face turns grey as he keeps shaking the girl, the way her head is slumping uselessly and her limbs flailing like noodles, and Dallas is running, running, shoving and not caring and ignoring the people around him, until he parts the booze-soaked Red Sea of dazed partiers.

Zig is still shaking her, and the closer he gets the more Dallas can hear his screams – "Wake up! Maya! Look at me, wake up!". He's got her by the shoulders, but her legs are gone, and she's slipping beneath him, and he can't get underneath and hold her up, the kid isn't fast enough…

But Dallas is, and he shoves the niner aside. As soon as his fingers are pried loose, the girl falls like a dress off a mannequin, nothing inside to hold her up. Her head bangs against the wall and her legs crumble bonelessly, folding over and heading straight for the unforgiving hardness below her…

And Dallas grabs hold, gripping onto her tightly and pulling her into his arms, not letting go and catching her before she hits the ground.


	9. Chapter 9

**Author's Note: Not much to say. Thanks to all who keep reading this.**

**I.**

She doesn't know where she is…but it doesn't matter, so she lets herself keep drifting. The nothing is everywhere around her, buoying her effortlessly, and it's so comforting she keeps letting it carry her wherever. She feels light as moonlight, clouds floating through her blood.

The longer she floats, the more things start to take shape. Above her there is nothing but sky – and beyond that, nothing but galaxy, endless sprawling blackness. Birds fly beneath her, clouds rush under like rapids, and she keeps going higher, higher, higher, until she's sailing among the stars.

The constellations spin around her, the stars glowing and dancing, sometimes coming close enough for her to touch. There's one that falls into her hands, and it shimmers on her skin. She holds onto it, trying to keep it from burning out, but before she can cup the light in her palms it falls to earth, and she's left watches it smear the sky with its memory, until the little star drops away from view.

Then she feels the hand in hers, and the sudden heaviness of it pulls her down, like the nursery rhyme and the cradle that falls.

It feels warm around her skin…and she suddenly feels cold, so, so cold. The hand holding hers is strong and warm, cupping her fingers and rubbing a thumb over her wrist. It's a safe feeling, and familiar.

_Cam_, she remembers blearily.

She tries to make her fingers move – grab his hand back, lace their fingers together like they do in the halls, slip it into her back pocket and let them walk intertwined. But her fingers stubbornly won't.

Still, the hand keeps holding on.

She blinks.

The room is too bright for her to keep her eyes open, and before she gets a good look around her, they slip shut and she can't get them open again. But she sees him sitting there – a dark, solid shape of broad shoulders and lanky limbs, rumpled clothes and shaggy hair swooping in his face, the slick sweat of his palm as it doesn't let go.

_Cam_, she thinks. She tries as hard as she can to picture him at her side, as if he can actually hear her. _Where am I?_

**II.**

"He doesn't look like you."

He doesn't know why he tells her that; it slips out, and as soon as it comes out he wishes he could take it back, because he can tell Vanessa's pissed.

She bristles. "What are you talking about?"

Dallas stares at Jayden, wrapped in a green blanket with dinosaur prints, thumb corked in his mouth and hair crazily poofing all over the pillow like a black cloud.

He wants to lean closer to Jayden. He's so still, so quiet. Dallas wants to put his hand to the little boy's mouth, check to make sure he's still breathing. But he just stands over his still little body and stares, blank.

Vanessa grabs his arm and pulls him outside, into the hallway. She clicks the door shut quietly behind her before rounding on him, her face drawn and angry.

"You show up here in the middle of the night smelling like beer and you want to see Jayden? I don't think so. Get lost."

"I didn't come here to see him," Dallas says.

"Then why are you here?" she hisses.

Dallas looks at the closed door, then back at her, in her sweatpants and tank top, hair wild and eyes ringed with dark shadows. Maya Matlin's skin was turning blue when they loaded her in the ambulance, her eyes like bruises in the middle of a sallow, sunken face. Zig Novak had kept screaming at her, kept shaking her shoulders, until the EMTs shoved him away so they could work on her.

Dallas held him back.

"Mike?"

He looks up at her, and for a second looks like she might care.

She makes a move as if she's going to touch him, but draws her hand back to her side, and instead folds her arms over her chest.

"What happened?" she asks quietly.

Dallas looks at his shoes. They're covered in mud and wet grass; it was raining when he followed the stretcher outside of the house. He stood in the middle of the driveway littered with empty Solo cups and broken beer bottles, watching the ambulance disappear while the light still glowed through the stormy night, the sirens screaming and hollering long after it had vanished into the darkness.

His throat tightens, and he has to close his eyes, but he still sees

_(black blood on the concrete –)_

the girl's pale face, her still chest. And she was so, so cold.

"I messed up, Vee," he mutters. "I messed up."

Vanessa reaches up, and this time, she puts a hand on his arm, tugging him forward.

"You're soaking wet," she mumbles. "Come on, you're freezing out here."

She gestures to the hotel room, and he follows her inside.

**III.**

A gasp.

"Maya?"

Hands on her face, warm and slick and shaking. Not like Cam's – they're too small, too supple, too delicate. They feel too warm on her skin, but they brush her cheeks, the undersides of her eyes, her forehead. It makes her skin feel stretchy, like she's wearing a rubber mask for a face instead of a face.

Where did her face go?

"Maya? Can you hear me? Maya?"

Something wet and sturdy presses against her; breath on her skin that tickles and smells sour. She tries to wrinkle her nose, but the mask face won't move.

She wants to open the mask eyes, but nothing. Her eyes are still too heavy to open.

Easier to keep them close. Can float off that way, go somewhere else, back among the stars to catch their light. Not here. Too heavy here…

"Maya?"

"Katie, shh, come on, okay; give her some air."

"She moved, I know she did!"

A pause. "Katie…"

"_She did!_" A wet, strangled sob, first loud then muffled. "She moved, I saw it!"

Maya's still drifting, but her sister's voice is strong and clear. She doesn't want to focus on it, but it's bringing her back to earth, anchoring her in place.

Her eyes open, slowly.

White everywhere. It's too bright, and it makes her close her eyes again. She only gets the faintest impression of two figures, one dark-headed and the other taller, standing in front of her while they speak.

The shorter figure turns around and is suddenly on top of her again, pressing its face to hers.

"Maya!" Katie's voice is clear and sharp, and, Maya can hear it now, full of tears and panic. "Oh god, please look at me, sweetie, please."

"Easy," the other voice says. The taller figure. Louder and soothing.

_Not Cam_, she notices.

No, not Cam…

Jake.

Jake. He's here.

Why is he?

Better question – why the hell is Katie here?

Where the hell is _here_, anyway?

Maya tries to sit up, but she still can't even wiggle her fingers. She tries to take a breath, and instead feels something in the base of her throat. It would make her gag, if she could.

"Maybe I should call a doctor…"

_Doctor?_

"Katie, it was probably just a reflex…"

"No! I saw her! I just…I'll get a nurse…"

"Okay, hold on. Look, you stay with her. I'll go get the nurse. Just…stay here, okay?"

_Wait,_ Maya thinks. _Don't leave me. Tell me what's going on!_

She wants to thrash, but finds she still can't even move her fingers. Panic wells up in her, and she feels like she might explode.

Focusing all of her energy on Cam's hand clutching hers, she pictures the image in her mind, feels the shape of the bones and ridges in his hand, the map of his veins in his wrist, the lifelines trailing across his damp palm. Hands she knows as well as her own frozen ones.

This time, she forces her eyes to stay open, no matter how bright the lights are.

Katie is standing at her side, her shape dark and blurry but getting closer to her as it descends on top of her.

"Maya!" Her sister is crying so hard she's half-gasping for breath, and Maya really registers her tone this time. Katie sounds so troubled and frantic that it makes her stomach hurt. The last time Katie cried like that was the day Drew broke up with her.

Her sister's hands press against her cheeks, and Katie bends their heads together to kiss her forehead.

"Oh god," her sister sobs, her arms slipping around Maya's shoulders. "Oh god, you scared me so much. Don't ever do that again! Don't!"

"Katie."

Jake's voice again. She can see his smudged outline, too, a blur of red and brown and gold, and as he comes closer into view she can see dark circles under his eyes, the tightness of his features.

Jake's hand comes to her sister's shoulder. "Katie, give her some air."

Katie ignores him.

She hears Jake sigh. "I'll go get your parents, okay?"

Before he leaves, he bends down close to her face. She can see the exhaustion in his eyes clearly now, along with the worry, and the…fear?

His hand comes to her forehead, and just rests there for a moment. It's rough and calloused, but he's surprisingly gentle.

"Welcome back, sweetheart," he murmurs, as he brushes the hair from her eyes.

Katie is still hanging onto her, her weight a solid presence at Maya's side. It takes her a second to realize that the reason Katie is hovering above her is because she's lying down…and she's in a bed, and it's not her own.

_Cam._

The hand holding hers. It's still holding it, but hanging on tightly, like she might disappear again if he lets go.

**IV.**

"They're still a little damp," Vanessa says, as she hands him the folded bundle of his warm-up pants and Ice Hounds windbreaker, "but that's all the quarters I had for the dryer."

He takes them anyway, trying not to wrinkle his nose at their mildewy smell. "Thanks," he mumbles.

Vanessa nods, shutting the bathroom door behind him as he slips back into his clothes. One forty-minute shower and nearly all the hot water later, he's finally stopped shivering, but his teeth are still chattering. He wipes away a part of the fogged-up mirror, sees the drawn look to his skin, and takes a deep breath, grinding his teeth together to make them stop.

Vanessa is sitting on the edge of Jayden's bed when he steps out of the bathroom, brushing the little boy's wild hair away from his sleeping face. She looks up at him, then looks back down to Jayden.

"Feeling warmer?" she whispers.

He nods. Thinks about taking the seat beside her, then decides to sit on the opposite bed instead.

Vanessa touches her fingers to Jayden's cheek. He shifts in the bed, and they both hold their breaths, hoping he won't wake, but he just turns over. Dallas watches his toddler belly pulsing as he breathes in and out, in and out, safe and steady.

"So," she says after a long moment of just watching Jayden, "I'm assuming you didn't just walk across half the city in the middle of the night to get a warm shower."

He stares at his hands in his lap.

"Mike." Vanessa looks up at him sharply. "Tell me what happened, or I'll call your billet parents. I don't think they want to come all the way out here at two in the morning."

The seat underneath him on the bed is starting to feel wet from his clothes.

"You remember he had green eyes, when he was born?" he says finally

Her eyes widen. "What?"

He looks at Jayden breathe again, and Vanessa sighs.

"Okay," she says. "You should really leave. I'll call a cab, if you need it, but you need to go home. You seriously can't be around him like this."

Dallas looks over at Jayden, curled like a comma in the darkness, barely an arm's length away.

"I screwed up," he mumbles.

She shakes her head, tapping her foot against the ground.

"You told me," Vanessa says. "So skip to the part where you tell me _how_."

He can't see her face very well in the shadows, but he knows she's scowling.

"What are you going to tell him about the adoption?" he says finally. "Are you really gonna just…give him up?"

He doesn't need to see her to feel the tension rolling off of her.

"Okay," she says. "Get out. I mean it. I can't deal with you, so get out."

"But you'd really just let go of him." The words come out a cold whisper.

"You walked all the way here for this?" Vanessa stands up and walks away from him, arms tense and swinging at her sides. "Alright, first of all, fuck you. Second of all, you're drunk and need to leave. And third, you lecture me about leaving?"

She glares at him, eyes hard and silver fury in the moonlight. "Better for him to have no dad then one who lets him go."

Dallas turns away from her; there's a hand at his throat, and its tight and unforgiving.

"I know," he murmurs, hanging his head. "You're right. I failed him. I failed and I let go."

Vanessa is standing over him, hands on her hips. Her face shifts to surprise, as tears slip down his own.

"I let," he stutters, then gasps. It's a deep, collapsing sound, and he puts an arm over his mouth to block the sound.

"I almost had him," he chokes out. "And then he wasn't…"

Vanessa frowns. "What are you talking about?"

Dallas looks up at her.

"I let go," he tells her. "I let go, and I shouldn't have, but I couldn't hold him anymore, and it's my fault…"

The last part comes out a strangled sob, and he doubles over in tears.

"It's my fault," he hears himself say, like he's going through a tunnel way too fast.

"Mommy?"

Vanessa turns around. Jayden is sitting up in bed, sucking his thumb. He takes it out of his mouth when he sees the two of them, and his own eyes fill with tears.

"Mommy?" he repeats weepily, reaching out for her. "Mommy!"

Vanessa sighs, then turns to him. She takes the boy into her arms and rocks him quietly, shushing his cries into her shoulder.

"It's okay," she whispers. "Shhh, shhh, baby, it's okay, it's okay, everything's okay, shh…"

Dallas sits on the edge of the bed, hands shaking in his lap, and watches Vanessa hush him until Jayden's tears peter off to a soft whimper. He watches her rock him slowly, hands wrapped around his head and lips pressed to his damp forehead, and lets his own eyes drift shut as he buries his head in his hands.

**V.**

It takes every effort she has to open her eyes again, but she forces it to happen.

There's a thin, shaggy-haired shape at the end of her bed, the side of the hand that's gripping hers so tightly. She can see the shape of Him so clearly, and no matter how much the haze of sleep wants to suck her under she keeps her eyes open.

_Cam,_ she thinks, trying to make her uncooperative body at least twitch in response. It's like she's made out of concrete. But she squeezes His hand back, and finds she CAN make her fingers move, so she squeezes again, and again, and makes her fingers close around his. He's here, and He's never let go of her.

Her sister's voice again, but it sounds like from far off. She tries not to notice it, just focuses on clutching His hand.

Her vision is still blurry, but the hand tightens around hers, pulling it into a fist. He leans closer, and she can smell the grass stains on His clothes, the sweat rolling off Him, and smoke, He smells like smoke, and

– when Zig bends closer down to her, says her name and grabs her with both his hands, she lets her eyes close. It all comes back to her, and this time, she doesn't fight the heaviness pulling her down.

**VI.**

Jayden won't go back to sleep, so Vanessa has to order a movie on Pay-Per-View to keep him occupied. While he sits mesmerized by talking cartoon monkeys, eating some dinosaur-shaped gummies and sitting in Dallas's lap, Vanessa listens.

"That kid on the roof?" she says.

Dallas nods. He picks at a frayed thread in the brownish-greenish-pukey colored comforter and doesn't meet her eyes.

"I did it," he says quietly.

Vanessa's brow furrows. "I thought he jumped."

"But I made him do it," he says.

She just shakes her head.

"How?" she demands. "I saw it on the news – the kid killed _himself."_

Dallas's hands twitch. Jayden shifts in his lap, trying to get comfortable, and he arches his back up against the headboard. He's more exhausted than he can ever remember being, but he can't seem to close his eyes.

Jayden turns to look at him. "No move," he scolds.

Vanessa half-smiles.

Dallas ruffles Jayden's hair. "Sorry, bud."

When Jayden's absorbed in his movie, Vanessa murmurs, "what do you mean, you _made_ him do it?"

He waits a moment before answering, focusing on the TV screen, listening to the chime and bounce of a sing-a-long. His eyes follow the little icon above the lyrics scrolling at the bottom of the screen, tapping each word of the melody.

"That day…" Dallas says, then stops. Rubs a hand over his eyes. "That morning. I yelled at him. I called him selfish and said it was his fault we lost the playoffs, and said he was failing everyone and he screwed everything up –"

He takes a deep breath.

"It's my fault," he whispers. "I yelled at him, and then he killed himself."

Vanessa looks away from him, and Dallas wonders if she's disgusted. Or scared. Or just morbidly curious. He wonders if she'll start looking at him the way everyone at school does, the way the team does when his back is turned in the locker room – like he's covered in blood and bits of broken glass, and holding a dead body in his arms.

Then she shakes her head again.

"People don't just wake up one day and decide to kill themselves," she says. "He probably had a lot of problems before he met you."

"That doesn't mean I didn't make him jump," Dallas argues.

"Do you really think that all it took was Mike Dallas being in a bad mood for a kid to jump off a rooftop?" Vanessa replies. "Whatever this was, it wasn't all about you. He probably had, you know, like a mental problem. Depression, or, I don't know, something like that. But whatever it was, that's probably what made him do it."

"He had food in his locker," Dallas says, and he turns cold again at the thought of it. Remembering cleaning out Cam's locker, seeing the moldy crusts of a lunch long forgotten, abandoned to rot away. "When I cleaned it out, I found lunch leftovers."

Vanessa raises her eyebrows. "So?"

"So," Dallas says, "people don't save leftovers if they're gonna off themselves later that day. Otherwise, what's the point in saving them."

He bites his lip, but doesn't feel any tears coming. Maybe he's just all cried out, at this point.

"He wasn't planning on doing it that day," Dallas says. "And then I yelled at him."

"No, come on, that's just stupid!" Vanessa says. She slides up closer to him until she's almost right in his face. "Just because he didn't plan on doing it that day doesn't mean he wasn't gonna do it the next. Or the week after, or next month. You getting mad at him over a hockey game isn't what made him do it. If not you, it would have been something else, and somebody else would be saying it's their fault the kid died."

"But he didn't just _die_," Dallas snaps. "He killed himself!"

She looks at him for a long moment, then takes a hand and squeezes his knee.

"Mike," she says finally, "a kid who kills himself after a bad hockey game has bigger issues than you. Okay?"

"I could have…" Dallas begins, then turns away.

Could have what? Saved Cam? Stopped Him? Made Him come down from the roof, apologized, gotten Him help? Sent Him home in a train, instead of a coffin?

He'd been there, right before. Burst onto the rooftop a full ten seconds before Cam took that leap. Froze in place, his voice along with it. Saw the boy turn to him, slowly.

Saw his little face crumbled, his eyes blank, his arms outstretched in his red hockey jacket, poised for flight.

He would later think about how those ten seconds seemed like ten _years_. Everything stopped moving, and they just stood there, a few steps away from each other, and just _stared. _

It didn't occur to him then – and he can never imagine _why_ – to scream for help, or try to talk him down. Not even to say, _stop._ Just to stare, watching the light frame him as he stood on the ledge, arms stretched out and head tilted straight up towards the sky.

Then he flew. Crouched and leapt, straight for the clouds like a bird dipping his wings towards the sun. He seemed to really hover there, like he might be floating, and it was only when Dallas heard a scream from below shatter that impossible stillness that he finally moved. And then he ran, sprinted, threw his arms out and grabbed at nothing and desperately reached for something –

And caught nothing except empty air, until he ran to the edge and saw the

_(black blood on the concrete – )_

body, twisted and crumpled and centered in a pooling stain of –

"I was too late," he mumbles. He closes his eyes and wonders if Maya Matlin will wake up. "I couldn't do anything."

Vanessa sighs. After a beat, she slides up next to him, brushing her shoulder to his, and squeezes his hand tight.

"And there's nothing you can do about it," she says quietly.

**VII.**

When she wakes up, Katie is fast asleep with Jake's arms around her, the two of them slumped into hard-backed chairs and his plaid shirt is draped over her shoulders. Her mom is sitting in the corner, legs covered by Dad's jacket, and Dad is nowhere to be seen.

It takes a colossal effort to make her head roll to one side, but she does, and she sees Zig's still there. Still with his hand in hers, except he looks ready to pass out himself. He's staring at the TV mounted into the wall. It's turned on silent, with closed captions she can't make out running across the bottom of the screen, and some guy in a police uniform chasing a guy down a flight of stairs.

When he sees her turn to him, he startles, and wipes the sleep from his baggy eyes.

"Do you want your mom?" he asks. "I think your dad went to get something from the vending machine."

She tries to open her mouth, but then remembers there's something stuck in it. She looks down and is only a little freaked to see a tube sticking out of her throat, snaking across her chest and all the way to one of the many beeping, clicking, blinking machines at her bedside. There's also a ton of other needles sticking out of her, and tons of nodes stuck to her chest underneath a flimsy hospital gown.

Zig follows her gaze.

"Yeah," he says, like he understands. "You…um, you have a tube down your throat. They had to put it there cause…"

He shifts his shoulders and bites his lip. "Cause you weren't breathing," he says quietly.

He looks down at their intertwined hands for a moment, then squeezes hers tightly.

"Do you remember what happened?" he whispers. "Anything? The party, or what you did before?"

She tries to shake her head no, but it takes too much effort. Zig seems to understand anyway, though.

"It doesn't matter," he tells her. "You're gonna be fine now, all the doctors said."

She can't move, so she just closes her eyes. Even that's exhausting, and she doesn't know how she'll be able to open them again.

_You don't get it, _she wants to say.

She wants to sit up and take off all the nodes and cuffs and IVs sticking out of her, move and thrash and run and make noise and explain what happened. But she's trapped in this bed and can't even breathe right, and nobody saw what she saw when she first woke up.

She remembered what it felt like, and she'd felt it, pulling her back to the ground.

The hand in hers had been Cam's, because she didn't forget that, not yet. She remembers everything about the way He stood, smelled, the way His shoulders sloped and the way His hair mopped and the way His profile looked, but mostly it was the hand in hers.

Before He left her.

Again.

He came and He held her hand and He helped her come back, but then He left her, and now she's all alone again.

Why did He leave her?

Tears start slipping down her rubbery cheeks. They feel numb, like she's been shot with Novocain. She can't move to wipe them away, but Zig takes the sleeve of his hoodie and mops them off her face. He even wipes the snot away, keeping it from clogging her nose.

Maya knows she should probably be mortified beyond belief – like, "chicken boob falling out during WhisperHug audition" mortified – that she has to be wiped like a baby, but she can't find it in her to care about it. She lays still while Zig, gently and carefully and without a hint of weirdness or disgust, wipes the tears and spittle and snot right off her face. He doesn't even fuss when she can't seem to stop the sobbing; he just grabbing tissues from the table at her bedside, and keeps dabbing her dry.

The numbness on her cheeks is fading, but she wishes it would go across her entire body, because everything hurts, everywhere.

He brought her back only to leave her again, and it hurts so bad she closes her eyes and wishes for that free sensation again –when she'd been flying among the stars and drifting into the nothing, just flying and floating and fading to black.


	10. Chapter 10

**Author's Note: This story now has a soundtrack! Available on my tumblr page in the fanfiction link.**

**(Tumblr: .com)**

**This is the last chapter. There will be one more update after this, the epilogue to close out the story.**

**I.**

He had a confusing dream – there was a bird and a flying boat, and he was swimming towards them, through an ocean so light it's almost green. Dallas paddled through the current, but couldn't feel the water around him, so it was like he was swimming through open sky.

He needed to get to the bird. But the harder he swam, the farther it flew, the more it sailed away from him, and the more Dallas was chasing its red tail through the sky, like chasing a comet across the atmosphere.

He kept swimming towards it, the bird always above him, always too far, and he kept trying to catch it but he was tired, and his eyes kept closing, but the bird was still there –

And when he wakes up, he's still wearing his shoes, and Vanessa is curled around Jayden on the bed beside him. Jayden sleeps unevenly, his breathing jerky like he's being thrown around.

The curtains hadn't been drawn all the way. Dallas peeks through the little opening. It's so late that even the sky looks like it's fallen asleep – the stars turned in, the moon given up.

He stares out the window, hand pressed to the cold glass.

_Were you scared?_ he wonders.

He looks at Vanessa, fast asleep on her bed, protecting Jayden even in her sleep. She's curled around him like a shell, her arms wrapped around his middle. One look at the two of them, and he knows she'd never actually let him go.

That's probably why she came here, he thinks. From the start, he always knew Vanessa couldn't do it, and really, she didn't come here for him. She came here so she could have someone tell her what to do. He'd only seen Jayden a handful of times in the last year and a half, and she probably figured he'd sign the papers and make everything easier for her.

She couldn't make the choice herself, so she tried to get him to do it for her.

_Well, she sure as shit picked the worst possible time_, Dallas thinks bitterly.

Somehow, Vanessa missed the memo that Mike Dallas has officially stopped making decisions that affect anybody else. Seeing as how it went SO well the last time.

Jayden curls into himself when he's asleep, Dallas notices. He's got his thumb corked in his mouth, a trail of drool puddling on the pillow, his legs tucked into his chest.

Dallas closes his eyes and leans back on the comforter. He listens to Jayden breathe. Outside, night will turn into day. Another one, and then another one, and then another one.

Dallas will keep getting older. Jayden will keep getting older. Soon he'll be tall and strong and the same age Dallas is now, and he'll have been alive more years on earth than Cam was.

Soon, Cam will be dead more years than he was ever alive. Everyone will get older, but he'll always stay young, and he'll always be so sad.

He squeezes his eyes shut, and wonders if Maya Matlin will be okay. Tries to remember the dream he had, but it's already fading from his memory.

**II.**

When she opens her eyes again, she's still in the bed, her arms strapped down in cuffs and IVs and needles. Katie and Zig and Jake are gone, in school for the day, but her parents are still here, talking to her nurses and trying to get her set up with the same rehab center that Katie went to.

Both Matlin girls there in the space of one year. They must think her family has _real_ promise.

Maya doesn't remember ending up in the ER, but then again, she doesn't remember getting any alcohol poisoning, either. When she tries to think back to the last thing she remembers, all that comes to mind is studying for a history test, maybe Wednesday or Thursday morning. She thinks.

A night turns into two, and they remove the breathing tube. She coughs and struggles even though they tell her not to, because it fucking _hurts_. Katie and Zig each hold one of her hands as they pull it out.

He's there every day with her, and even comes to visit on his lunch hour.

Whatever holes she can't fill, Zig does the heavy lifting. Haltingly, he tells her about the party, about how she was so drunk she couldn't stand, couldn't talk. About how she blacked out, Mike Dallas called an ambulance, and by the time they arrived everyone had cleared out of the house, including Skye. Zig rode with her in the ambulance.

Maya remembers none of it. The clearest memory she has of the last…week, or so, is studying for that history test. Her memory feels like someone cut massive holes in it, like those kindergarten projects where they cut paper to make snowflakes.

Unfortunately, she remembers everything of the few days she's in the ER, and none of that gets any less clear. Her parents' stricken faces, looking at her with a mix of horror and disbelief. Katie refusing to leave her side, and clutching her hand so tightly her fingers turn white. Tori and Tristan coming to see her after school, Tristan trying to engage them in gossip and failing miserably while Tori tries not to cry and fails equally miserably.

Skye doesn't come to see her. He doesn't call, text, tweet, or message her on Facerange. He just drops out of her orbit, sucking all those unknown days away from her like some giant black hole.

Maya doesn't care one way or the other.

She's told how lucky she is to have survived what happened, how lucky she was that her friends called 911 immediately and got her help right away. How lucky she is that she doesn't have any permanent brain damage, that her heart never stopped, that this or that didn't happen – bottom line, she's alive, and she almost wasn't.

Jake stops by every now and then. One day he brings her something – a packet of seeds for marigolds – and says that she should let him make spaghetti for her sometime. He's been growing the tomatoes and spices for homemade sauce; he and Katie have been making it and testing it themselves.

He brings her something else, too. He hands it to her with cupped, safe hands – an orchid in a little clay pot. He grew it himself.

It's the perfect gift.

She leaves it on the table by her bedside, so it's the first thing she sees when she wakes up.

**III.**

As much as he remembers every vivid detail of That Day, there are whole weeks After that he can't remember. It feels to him, sometimes, as if someone haphazardly cut his memories away, a toddler chopping off his own hair with chubby, unsure fingers.

The strongest memory he has of those lost few weeks isn't the funeral, or the bus ride home from the funeral, or the fight he had with Luke on the way to the funeral because Luke wouldn't put on the red tie, and Dalton had to keep Dallas from strangling Luke with it to make him put the damn thing on. It was of a dinner. The night Mrs. Torres cooked celery.

He sat at the table, pushing the limp celery around on the plate. It was touching the edges of his roasted pork, and some of it was in his sweet potatoes. He tried to segregate the offending damp vegetable from the rest of his food, but it was too late; the damage was done.

He pushed the plate away, and Mrs. Torres zeroed in on him.

"You not hungry, Dallas?"

Drew and Adam stared at their own plates. Dallas opened his mouth then closed it again, then said, "I don't like celery."

It sounded rude, and Mrs. Torres must have registered it, but she covered it up gracefully.

"It's okay," she said smoothly, reaching for his plate. "I can get you a new one."

"No," he blurted, sounding angry for some reason. "I don't, I don't need a…it's okay, I just don't like my food touching so…I don't need a new plate, I'm being…I don't need it…"

Mrs. Torres set the plate down carefully, then reached over and touched his arm.

"Dallas?" she said quietly. "Are you okay?"

Dallas stared at the table. The celery was still touching his pork and potatoes, and he didn't want another plate, but he needed another plate, and –

"I don't –" he took a rough gasp for air – "I just, I don't need another plate, I just hate celery, sorry…"

He turned and left the table without asking to be excused, and hurried out the back kitchen door. Started running, even when he heard Mrs. Torres calling him from the mail box. Kept running until he reached the pool behind the River Hill apartment complex, the one where he took Alli just a few weeks ago.

He climbed the fence in one swift motion, then tore his shirt off and kicked his shoes aside. He stood at the water's neon edge for a moment, watching the ripples glimmer off the glowing green surface, shaking and numb. Then he leaped in, letting himself sink to the bottom and opening his eyes to a world full of darkness.

There was nothing above or below him, just a stinging view of a warm underwater world, where he floated and drifted and hovered, suspended in a soft darkness that bat in his ears like a heartbeat. The water moved around him like dark silk, and he put his hand out, moving it around, watching it twist and float, buoyed like a limb not fully grown, like it was still trying to figure out how to become an arm.

His eyes stung from the chlorine, and blackness sparked behind them, his chest on fire from lack of air. But he stayed anchored to the bottom like he was being held down, and remembered –

_Running. Running in the pouring rain, freezing rain, empty field at night. Coach is screaming and they keep running, jogging around the cones, keeping in formation, shirts off and rain like needles at their backs. Cam is next to him, and Dallas can hear him laboring, struggling to keep up with them._

"_Come on, Rookie," Dallas says, slapping him between the shoulders. "Keep it going, one in front of the other, keep it up."_

"_Caaaaaan't," Cam wheezes, his head hanging down. He's barely keeping up, Dallas can tell. _

"_Come on, Cam," Dallas urges. "Don't do this. Don't quit on me now, man. Come on, one foot in front of the other. Step, step, step, come on man, just keep going, don't stop…"_

_Cam's response is to choke on his breath, coughing and doubling over as he tries to catch his breath._

_Dallas peers over his shoulder, but Coach doesn't seem to have seen them come to a stop. Dallas turns to Cam and bends to his eye level, putting a hand on the smaller boy's shoulder._

"_Cam." The rain pours around them, wild and freezing. "Come on, man. I need you to just keep going. Just a little bit longer."_

_Cam stays doubled over, hands on his hips. Dallas can feel him shaking, and not just from the cold. _

"_I can't," he repeats. _

"_You have to!" Dallas pushes him a little. "It's not that much farther."_

_Cam still looks at the torn-up ground, his clothes spattered with mud and his face red._

_Dallas meets his eyes._

"_Let's go, Rookie," he says. "It's just a few more steps – "_

_Just keep going –I never meant to – how could you do it? How did it get like this – why didn't I – Why did you have to – this is all my fault – why did you – stupid son of a bitch, why didn't you tell anybody? Why didn't you ever get help? Why didn't you just TELL me? It's my fault, it will always be my fault, I made this…I made this happen, and you never talked, and now you never will, you just left, and you don't get that I'll always have this – I'll always know I lost you, I'll always have you and lose you, have you and lose you – _

Then he broke the surface. Air flooded his lungs, and he coughed, sputtering. His lungs felt newborn, thin as tissue, and his eyes blurred from the pool and salty tears. Shaking, he paddled to the side of the pool, pulling herself up on the rung of the ladder and shuddering until he remembered knowing how to breathe. It felt like something he hadn't done in ages.

The water dripped from his eyelashes. The taste of salt was on his lips, bitter and stinging, and he wiped it away, staring at the water. He breathed and tasted the bitterness on his tongue, dripping salty regret, feeling hollow and dark as the empty, glowing water below him.

He feels the same way now as he sits on the edge of the pool, staring at the water and remembering that night. Cherry blossoms have fallen in from the surrounding trees, the petals floating on the surface, and he watches them cluster by the drains. Dallas sits on the concrete and stares at the still water, the reflection of the sun sparkling on the glassy surface, and the shadows creeping over the city as night chases the daylight away. He stares at the water, and remembers that freezing silver night, watching Cam fight for breath in the darkness, the ground crumbling under their feet. The way he told Cam to keep going, just a few more steps. Dallas can't remember if he made it or not.

**IV.**

They release her from the hospital on Thursday morning. Her parents drive in silence occasionally punctured by non-sequitor observations and telling Maya about what's coming next.

"I tried getting an earlier appointment," her mother says, "but next Wednesday was as early as I could get in. But the hospital left me the names and numbers of other counselors, if you want to talk to someone earlier."

"Dr. Marling is really great," Katie urges. "She helped me a lot when I was in rehab. She makes you feel so comfortable and safe, like you can tell her anything and she'll never judge you. She's amazing, Maya. You'll like her, I promise."

Maya nods when she's meant to, and murmurs something that sounds appropriate when a response is necessary. Rain is crawling over the city, dark clouds hovering over the highway like bad dreams.

When they get home, Katie helps her into the house. Maya tries to protest, then realizes she doesn't have legs when she nearly falls getting out of the car. Katie even has to unbuckle her from the seat, because the effort is too much. Maya blushes to the roots of her hair; this almost ranks up there with her chicken boob falling out at Whisperhug auditions, or kissing Cam's ear during their garden date.

At the memory of that pasta salad-and-earlobe kiss, Maya looks away, staring out the window. The air smells like rain, and the deep blue sky above them is just about to break.

Katie takes her by the shoulders and half-carries her inside.

"Hold on a sec, Maya," she says, as they stop at the couch. Maya sinks against it in relief – the ten feet from the car to the door seemed a lifetime. "Let me get Mom's spare wheelchair."

"I don't -" Maya says, breathless, then takes a breath. "I don't need a wheelchair."

Katie frowns. "Uhh, you look like an old lady. I think it would be best."

Maya shakes her head, willing herself to stand up straight.

"Just," she gasps, trying to breathe normally, "give me a minute."

Katie looks skeptical, but sighs.

"Okay," she says. "I'm gonna get your overnight bag from the car. Can you not fall over?"

Maya waves her hand in her sister's face. "Go."

When she hears Katie head towards the garage, Maya uses all the strength she has left in her scrawny arms. They feel like limp noodles under her weight, but she bites her lip and forces herself upright, gripping the edge of the couch as she straightens her back and stands up for the first time since entering the hospital.

There's a mirror across the room from her. Maya hasn't looked in one since she was admitted in the ER. She knows she looks gross, but she's morbidly curious, and can't keep her eyes from drifting that way. She turns, and gets the first good look at herself she's gotten since before she ended up in the hospital.

It's not a pretty sight, and at first she blinks like she's not sure it's really her. But it is, because the drawn, pale, matted thing in the mirror is definitely blinking back. She's so thin that her skin looks like a balloon, widened and stretched over bones that jut out and make her face a slope of lines and edges. There are bruises dotting all over her arms from the IVs and medicines she's had stabbed into her, making her arms look like a smeared watercolor. Her hair looks two shades darker from grease, and hangs in unwashed tangles to her shoulders.

But it's her eyes that scare her the most. Huge and round in the center of her skeleton face, they're ringed with black and bagged with sunken circles that seem to pull her entire face inward. The color seems to be washed out of them, so they just stare back at her with stark white emptiness, drained of any spark or thought or recognition.

They look lifeless.

She doesn't know who this girl is, and it scares her.

Maya stares at the reflection in the mirror until her eyes begin to tear, until she can't even make out what she's looking at anymore. She turns away from the reflection of the girl she doesn't know, the skeleton with dead eyes, gutted and hollow as a Halloween pumpkin.

"Maya?"

Katie reaches out to her and puts an arm around her shoulder.

"You should rest," she says. She has a pair of their mom's old crutches with her, and hands them to Maya. "Come on."

Katie helps her limp to her room, pulling back the (newly changed and washed, Maya notices, for the first time since Cam died) bedcovers and helps her in. She pulls the covers over her, smoothing them out just like Mom used to, and even brushes some gnarly, greasy hair out of Maya's drooping eyes.

"Ewwww," Katie says, making a face at her when she pulls her hand away from the mop that is Maya's hair. "Okay, first up on the agenda after you get some rest, you need to shower before a bird starts nesting in that thing."

Maya attempts a grin. "What, you don't think dreads are a good look for me?"

Katie looks mildly alarmed, so Maya says, "that WAS a joke, Katie."

Her sister smiles, or tries to.

"Just, try and rest, okay?" she murmurs. She turns off the lamp on Maya's bedside, and smooths the covers over her one more time before getting up to leave. Katie hovers in her doorway for a moment, watching her, before closing the door behind her.

Maya lies back and takes a deep breath. As great as it feels to be home and NOT in a hospital bed attached to a breathing tube, she was in bed for almost a week. She wishes she could just go for a walk outside, or at least sit in the backyard. But the longer Maya lies there under the smooth, lavender-scented covers, the more she feels the pull of sleep.

She nestles under her blankets and stares up at her ceiling. Stares at the stars. Their shorted formation barely glows in the dim twilight. She never noticed it before, but the shape they make could vaguely resemble a grin.

For a moment, she looks to the empty space in the formation – the space where that lost star used to be. Maya can't see the glue still clinging to her ceiling, but knows it's still there, the missing piece of her galaxy.

She wonders if she'll ever figure out what happened to that little fallen star. If it's gone forever, or if she'll come across it one day – one day, of course, after she's stopped looking for a while. Someday, years later, after she thinks she's forgotten about it. Then she'll come across that dusty piece of plastic, and remember its plunge from her universe.

For now, though, the remaining ones glow down from their spots in her sky. In darkness they mimic the glimmer and purpose of navigation, of constellations that could tell myths and legends, could whisper fates and wishes to the world below. Maps to guide, fireflies to capture and call Tinkerbell, candles to guide home. If you didn't know any better, you couldn't tell there's something missing from that dark expanse.

But she'll always know.

She closes her eyes, too tired to pull her knees to her chest. Even the effort of pulling the comforter over her aching body seems too hard a job, and when she yanks it up to her chin she feels like she just sprinted an entire marathon. Exhausted, she closes her eyes and lets herself sink into the mattress, feeling heavy enough to fall through the earth.

A knock on the door, and Katie pokes her head in without waiting for an invite.

"You need anything?" she says. "Water, a snack, another blanket?"

It's a Herculean effort to open her eyes. "Sleep," she mutters, turning over and pulling the blanket over her eyes.

Katie steps inside and sits on the edge of her bed. She smiles down at her, and Maya smiles back. She's about drift off when she turns her head, and realizes she almost missed it: the little bulb rests on her bedside table right next to her lamp and alarm clock, practically waving at her from its watchful perch.

"You brought home my flower?" she asks.

"Well, yeah." Katie says. "What, did you think I was gonna let it die?"

Maya's too astonished to comment. Just lies back down eyes closing, as the bright flower keeps watch over her, gulping in the light and reaching upward, looking strong and healthy and whole.

**V.**

"My sister left home last night."

Owen's head snaps up to Luke. "The Barbie? What happened?"

Luke takes a swig of his beer, then stares at the rim of the can. "She got into it with my dad, and then got picked up by one of her friends."

"What'd they fight about?" Owen asks.

Instead of answering, Luke swishes the remainder of the drink in his hands. "You know my dad's a pastor, right?"

When no one replies, he says, "He said some stuff Becky didn't like, and they got into it."

"Is it about the Torres kid again?" Dalton asks.

"Your sister's still dating that freak?" says Cody.

Luke shakes his head. "No, not him."

"Then what kind of stuff?" Owen crumples the can in his palm. Reaches for another. "Come on, dude, the suspense is killing me."

Silence. No one's eyes move, but the heat in the room turns to Dallas, sitting on an overturned crate, still on his first beer. He takes a long drink of it, downing the rest in a single gulp.

Owen pops his top. "So," he says, ignoring the tense silence. "What did he say?"

Luke shrugs one shoulder. "It was last night. My dad's Bible Study. Becky was hoping he could do a reading or…something, I don't know the whole story, really. But she wanted to talk about…" he shuffles his feet, "like, stuff about him, and my dad wouldn't let her."

Luke doesn't have to clarify which _him_ he's talking about.

"Just because he wouldn't read?" Owen asks.

Luke nods. For a moment, the only sounds are the whimpering fizzles of beer, and the too-loud gulps trying to drain the silence like venom from a wound.

"Why wouldn't he do it?" Owen finally says. "Doesn't your dad do…like, funerals and stuff?" His voice doesn't hitch on _funerals_ and he pretends it didn't almost.

"Sometimes," Luke replies.

"So…" Cody says. "What's the problem?"

Luke pulls his knees up on the couch. He rests them underneath, folding into himself. He looks at the dingy walls, the insulation falling out of the rips and tears, and his eyes trail an electrical cord that climbs up to the ceiling.

"He says the Bible's clear," he says.

"About what?" Dalton asked.

Luke's eyes are now fixed on the ceiling.

"About…" He closes them, opens, back to the ceiling again. "You know."

No. Yes. Know.

"What did your sister say?" Dallas asks, finally.

Nobody turns to look at him. Luke is still looking at the ceiling, like he has the answers written up there. He takes another sip, though Dallas would bet there's nothing left in the can.

"She said…" He grips the can in his palm. "She said, uh, she said if there was a God, He'd, you know…have mercy. He'd just want him to be at peace."

Dallas looks at the ceiling himself, and just like he already knew, there were no answers there. Still, he keeps his head tilted upward, looking straight into the fluorescent lights until he can't stand it anymore, and blinks with bright flashes sparking behind his eyes.

He takes another sip. _You think someone who was that unhappy would get some kind of pay-off_, he thinks.

Then, on the heels of that: _yeah, well, since when is anything fair. Ever._

**V.**

"What's the main emotion you think of when you remember Campbell Saunders?"

Maya looks across the room at Dr. Marling. She doesn't look like a shrink – or at least, what Maya pictured a shrink would look like. She doesn't have a clipboard, she doesn't have one of those long couches to lay on, she doesn't adjust her glasses every two seconds and say, "how does that make you feel?". She doesn't even wear glasses. She wears a pair of slacks and a blouse, and very little make-up. She looks almost preppy, and young. Maya can see why Katie liked her, why she found it so easy to confide in her.

Not that Maya's into doing the same.

"Anger," she says, after a moment. "At first. I was angry." She stares at her hands in her lap, chips at the fresh teal nail polish Katie put on the other night. "I AM angry. Still."

"At Campbell."

Maya stares at her thumbnail. She's taken off most of the polish there.

"At myself," she says.

Dr. Marling leans forward. "Why do you feel angry at yourself?"

Maya chips off a particularly big piece of nail polish. The chipping falls into her lap.

"Because," she says. "Why shouldn't I?"

Dr. Marling watches her for a moment.

"Maya," she says, "I'm not sure I understand."

Maya sighs. "The night before…the day before he – died – " she has to pause at the word, "Cam spent the night at my house. My parents weren't home, and he spent the night on my couch. With me. And we…"

There's a little decorative box on the table beside her. Maya takes it, and opens it, finds nothing inside except a fake red velvet lining. She runs her fingers over it.

"Nothing happened," she says quickly. "But we…it was the best night of my life. And he said so, too."

She pulls her phone out of her pocket, and clicks to the video Cam left her that morning. She gives it to Dr. Marling, then presses play:

"Gooooood morning, Maya Matlin! So, I am now in your bathroom – or rather, the guest bathroom, which, for the record, smells FANTASTIC, thanks to this Glade plug-in thingy…I would compliment your mom on this, but that would involve telling your parents that I slept here, and that would be awkward. Unquestionably so, I believe. Anywhosers, I'm brushing my teeth with your sister's toothpaste…HI KATIE! DON'T KILL ME! – and it occurs to me that I basically had the best night pretty much of all time, ever. So….yeah. Thank you for that. I want to take you out for lunch to celebrate. So, um, if you want to meet me on the steps outside, I will take you someplace special…it's a surprise, so don't bother trying to get it out of me! I will NEVER GIVE THIS UP!"

She's watched this video so many times that she can remember the exact moment his face changes. He will tilt his neck back, open his mouth, and let loose a mad scientist-like cackle, hooting maniacally.

"Yeah," he says, and Maya remembers his face returning to its sweet smile, bed-headed and sleepy-eyed, the happiness in his face. Twelve hours before. "So, anyway. Stairs. Lunch. SURPRISE. It's top-secret. And I will see you there!"

The video ends. Twelve hours to go.

"That was…" Maya clears her throat. "That was the last time I saw him. That day. That video. So how could he have done that and then…"

Dr. Marling hands her the phone back.

"Maya," she says gently, "you weren't responsible for what happened to Campbell. And neither was Campbell. What happened…it's something that he probably struggled with for years. You couldn't have solved it."

"But he looked happy in that video!" Maya argues. "He looked happy, he WAS happy, and he planned to take me out to lunch. He looked happy, and then he just…left! He left me!"

Maya put her hands over her face.

"Why did he leave me?" she whispers. "Why did I make him leave?"

Dr. Marling touches her back.

"You didn't," she says. "This had nothing to do with you, Maya, nothing."

Maya bites her lip.

"It kinda is," she says.

Dr. Marling cocks an eyebrow. "Why? She asks.

It doesn't sound like an accusation. She sounds genuinely curious.

Maya closes the box, turning it over in her hands. She almost tells her about everything – Zig, Tori, the pageant, Battle of the Bands, the charm bracelet – but instead turns and stares at the window, the light peeking in through the curtains.

"You know what I _hate_?" she says. "People telling me he's in a better place. Like, I don't _want_ him to be in a better place! I want him here, with me! Drinking root beer and watching _Criminal Minds_ and doing English homework.

"They probably don't know what else to say to you," Dr. Marling says. "They're dealing with a trauma, same as you. They're just trying to help you out."

"Yeah, well, they suck at it," she snaps.

Maya looks out the window, watches the cars go by on the street outside. She wonders what the lives of the people inside those cars are like.

How did people live like this? People everywhere survived with beds not slept in, clothes unworn, not needing to buy that brand of shampoo or this type of cereal; the extra seat at the dinner table, the empty bedroom, one less plate in the sink. How the hell could words like _death, grief, suicide, why_ even fit in somebody's mouth?

Did the cashier at the grocery story live with this kind of agony? The school janitor? The receptionist at her orthodontist's office? How did they live like this?

"Why don't you give yourself a break?" Dr. Marling says. "You should. It's okay to give yourself a breather every now and then."

Maya stares at the carpet, at her scuffed-up Converse. On a whim, she had drawn OBEY MY SHOES across the toes, and checker-boarded the sides with red and black Sharpies. Tristan threatened to throw the shoes out when she wasn't looking. That had been at the start of the year, during a study hall. Before Cam.

What was his family doing? His parents, brothers, his sister…would they ever get past this? Would anyone?

"I don't," is all she says.

**VI.**

Dallas's phone buzzes in the locker room, right before he's about to change for practice.

_On my way home._

At first, Dallas thinks that she means the hotel. _C U tonite?_

After a moment, Vanessa texts back.

_No. We're going home. _

He stares at the screen for a moment, then realizes what she really means.

_I need to say bye to J,_ he replies.

_We needed 2 leave_, she says. Then, after a moment, _thank u for signing the papers._

He gave them to her yesterday, when he went over there during his lunch break. But he never thought that meant she would disappear back home to Guelph without a word to him about it.

_What about J?_ he replies.

_Im not making a choice yet, _she says. _But thank you for the papers. _

Dallas keeps waiting for her to say something else, long after it's clear she's done answering.

"Dallas!" Coach yells. "Get off your damn phone! You're not even suited up!"

Dallas glances over at him, then back to the glowing screen.

How could she disappear like that with Jayden? Why doesn't he get to see him, one last time?

Why doesn't he get to say goodbye?

**VII.**

Tori shows up the next day with all the homework she missed.

"Really, Tor?" Maya rolls her eyes. "You couldn't bring chocolate?"

Tori hands Maya her history and biology binders, as well as her French vocab workbook. Maya tries not to look at it, and slides it to the bottom of the stack.

"Tris and I spent the weekend doing all your assignments," she says. "All you have to do is sign your name."

Maya grins at her. "Chocolate? What's that?"

Tori reaches in for a hug, and Maya wraps her bruised, spindly arms around her.

"So," Tori says. "How do you feel? Can you come back to school yet?"

Maya shrugs. "The doctor says I should be okay by Monday." She looks away. "Not sure if I want to face everybody."

Tori takes a seat on the bed beside her.

"What are they all saying?" Maya murmurs. "How stupid I am, or just what a slut I am for hooking up with another guy, like, two seconds after Cam?"

Tori touches her shoulder.

"Nobody's saying anything," she says.

Maya shakes her head. "You're lying. Everybody's been talking about me for weeks. At least now, it's because of stuff I did."

Maya finds herself sniffling, wiping something away she didn't even know was there.

"You're a good friend to lie, though," she says.

Tori squeezes her shoulder. "It's the truth, Maya."

"You've been such a good friend through this whole thing," Maya says. She looks away, focusing on a spot on the floor. "And I'm such a total bitch. I don't…I'm sorry I was, like, the worst friend ever. You didn't deserve it."

"You're not a bitch, Maya," Tori urges, slipping an arm around her and squeezing her tightly. "I should say sorry. I kept bugging you to do stuff all the time when you didn't want, and I never tried talking to you about anything."

"I wasn't really in the mood for talking," she mutters.

Tori hugged her. "I could have tried harder, though." She shakes her head. "I never wanted to just keep saying, 'oh, you'll move on someday' or 'it's okay, he's in a better place'… because I didn't think you wanted to hear that. But I didn't want you to stop living. To stop _feeling_ like living."

Tori stares at the floor. "But I guess movies and girls nights and sushi were just like saying, 'oh, go ahead and forget all about him'."

"No, they weren't," Maya says. "You were trying to help. Even after…" Maya sighs. "I was a horrible friend, and you were only trying to help me."

"You're not a horrible friend," Tori replies.

Maya snorts. "Really? I kissed your boyfriend, then lied to you about it. Think that makes me a pretty horrible friend."

Tori shakes her head. "It doesn't matter. That was a long time ago. Or, at least, it feels like it is. Okay?"

She just shakes her head. "If I were you," Maya mutters, "I'd never speak to me again."

"Well, good thing you're not me," Tori says gently.

When Maya looks away, Tori says, "Maya, look, it doesn't matter, okay? You need to stop punishing yourself for it –"

Before she can stop herself, Maya doubles over into sobs, gasping and half-screaming into her hands as her face crumples and collapses. Her chest heaving, she lays down on the bed and nearly falls off as she shakes, gulping in air between sobs radiating through her entire body.

Tori looks alarmed, and her lip trembles, close to tears herself. She touches Maya's shoulder and tries to look at her, but Maya can't look at her, can barely move.

"You should," she wails. "I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm so bad, I'm bad, I'm sorry, it's all my fault."

She keeps repeating that last part over and over again, between hiccups and shudders and ragged, choking breaths. Tears pour down as she tucks her knees to her chest, keeping her head down as she howls into the soaking wet comforter.

Tori keeps a hand on her shoulder, and rests the other one on the top of her head. Gently, she pushes Maya's damp hair away.

"Maya, no," she whispers, her voice shaky.

Maya ignores her.

"I'm bad," she repeats, over and over. "I'm bad, I'm sorry, I ruined everything, it's my fault. It's my fault, my fault, I'm sorry, I'm so, so, so sorry, it's all my fault!"

Tori doesn't say anything, just keeps holding onto her. While Maya cries, cries, cries, wanting to melt into her lavender comforter and remembering the smell of ice and toothpaste and sweat and laundry detergent that stuck to Cam, how soft and warm and real He was next to her on the couch, the smell and the feel and the aliveness of Him and now there's nothing, her hand in His and her head resting against His beating heart and "I want to take you out for lunch to celebrate" video, but no, no lunch, no hands, no heart, just a sack of bones rotting below the ground under a red brick church. She'd never see Him again, never ever EVER. Forever.

She let Him get away from her, and he did.


End file.
